PLAYBACK, PLAYFORWARD
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIM
T3
Q_
I
T3
03
03
O
03
_Q
>>
03
CO
03
H — '
CD
o
CD
O
03
IT WAS TODAY
One day, some of the futures of today will have been
presents (and then pasts). Others won't. This is hardly
news. But what kind of apparatus is "future"? It car-
ries many things; promise, determination, hope, imagi-
nation, anticipation - or a present. Many a newspaper
holds many of those together. This here looks a bit like
a newspaper. An analogue device that can be useful to
play forward, play back or pause some ideas.
This is a publication that aims to draw together some
questions, methods and projects addressing organi-
zational, learning and semantic practices as of 2007.
In an attempt to remember certain of our ambitions
of the time, this newspaper aims to draw out some of
their problems, possibilities and consequences- it has
been edited by Manuela Zechner and refers to persons
and undertakings that can be said to connect in the
first place with the contexts of art, open source, activ-
ism and education.
In this extensive playing field, there are many projects
that have struck me as interesting and which I hope to
open out and interrogate in different formats here: Self-
organized and open collaborative assemblies, tempo-
rary self- inaugurated gatherings in educational, arts
and activist contexts.
At the same time, this publication will have
offered an opportunity to look closer at individual
practices (as of 2007) and the strategies, wishes and
ideas invested in them, their states of discourse and
visibility- this happens via texts, transcripts of inter-
views from the future archive project (which holds as a
frame for this newspaper), as well as via presentations
of methodologies.
My intention here, as with the future archive, is to draw
together and open out a topology of divergent practices
in relation to their political stakes, the ideas for change
and movement that people invest in them, through look-
ing at the language, organizational forms and contexts
they operate with(in).
Apologies if much of this seems outdated, admittedly
most of the content of this magazine is from 2007.
This was however a conscious selection made by the
editor- to suggest possibilities for back projection as
well as for leaning forward perhaps. However while giv-
ing points of approach, this publication is not made to
tell or determine what the old days were or became,
but perhaps to look at some ways of using this "future"
apparatus. The views expressed here are impartial and
stem from experience as much as research and discus-
sion: any resemblance between places or characters
dead or living could be fictional.
^ MZ
ES WAR HEUTE
Eines Tages werden manche der Zukiinfte von heute Ge-
genwarten gewesen sein (und dann Vergangenheiten).
Das ist nicht wirklich eine Neuigkeit. Aber was fur eine
Art Dispositiv ist "Zukunft"? Es birgt viele Dinge in sich:
Versprechen, Versicherung, Hoffnung, Imagination, Antiz-
ipation - oder Gegenwart. So manche Zeitung erschlieSt
viel dergleichen. Dies hier sieht ein bisschen wie eine Zei-
tung aus. Ein analoger Apparat, der niitzlich sein kann, um
Ideen ab-, vor- und zuriickzuspielen, oder zu pausieren.
Diese Publikation versucht, verschiedene Fragen, Meth-
oden und Projekte zusammenzubringen, die organisator-
ische, lernbezogene und semantische Praxen anno 2007
betreff en. Als Versuch, sich an manche unserer Ambitionen
zu erinnern und manche der damit verbundenen Probleme,
Moglichkeiten und Konsequenzen anzusprechen, wurde
diese Zeitung von Manuela Zechner herausgegeben und
bezieht sich auf Personen und Projekte die in erster Linie
mit Kontexten von Kunst, Open Source, Aktivismus und
Bildung verbunden sind.
Auf diesem weiten Spielfeld gibt es viele Projekte die mir
nahe liegen und als interessant erschienen, und die ich mir
vorgenommen habe hier in verschiedenen Formaten vor-
zustellen und zu hinterfragen: selbst - organizierte und of-
fene kollaborative Gruppen, temporare selbst- inaugurierte
Treffen in Bildungs-, Kunst und aktivistischen Kontexten.
Gleichzeitig wird diese Publikation eine Mogli-
chkeit dargestellt haben, naher auf individuelle Praxen und
die Strategien, Wunsche und Ideen (anno 2007), die dahi-
ngehend investiert werden, einzugehen. Es geht dabei oft
um deren Diskurse und Sichtbarkeit. Diese Praxen finden
sich in Texten, Interview- Transkripten vom future archive
Projekt (das einen Rahmen dieser Zeitung vorgibt) und
Prasentationen von Methodologien reflektiert.
Mein Vorhaben hier, wie auch mit dem future archive, ist
es, eine Topologie verschiedener Praxen hervorzubringen
und zuganglich zu machen, unter Bezugnahme auf deren
politische Ansatze, Vorstellungen von Veranderung und
Bewegung. Eine Betrachtung der Sprache, organisator-
ischen Form und Kontexte innerhalb derer die avorgestell-
ten Praxen funktionieren, soil das ermaglichen.
Moglich, dass vieles davon altmodisch aussieht oder als
Anachronismus erscheint, zugegebenermafien stammt ein
GroSteil des Inhalts aus dem Jahr 2007. Dabei handelt es
sich allerdings um eine bewuSte Entscheidung der Heraus-
geberin - um einen Riickkoppelungs - und Projektionsef-
fekt zu schaffen, der vielleicht unerwartete Moglichkeiten
der Erinnerung und Antizipation birgt. Wahrend Ansatze
vorgeschlagen werden, nimmt sich diese Publikation nicht
vor, vorzugeben was die alten Zeiten waren oder wur-
den, sondern vielleicht einige Moglichkeiten, mit diesem
"Zukunfts" Apparat umzugehen. Die hier zum Ausdruck
kommenden Ansichten sind von Erfahrung genauso wie
von Forschung und Gesprachen gepragt. Jede Ahnlichkeit
mit lebenden oder real existierenden Orten oder Personen
konnte fiktiv sein.
CONTENTS
1 it was today/index
2 what is the future
2 + 3 future archive interviews (1)
4+5 future is a verb
6 Interviews (2)
6+7 the future archive project
8-11 b l w : i'm going to tell you
sth no one else can tell you
who wasn ' t there
11+12 interviews (5)
12-17 negotiating speech and
organizational practices/
G 8 + S U MM I T
17+18 the collide/collabo project
19 critical practice
20 + 21 vocabu lab0rat0r i es
21 everybodys
23-25 playing fields
25-28 industrialtownfuturism
return of the meshwork markets
29-39 what are the creative
industri es
40-43 a generalized inquiry
into the character of work
44 colophon
MZ
2
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
WHAT IS THE FUTURE
Valie Djordjevic
What was this thing called money again?
What is the future? It does not exist yet and when it comes
it disappears and becomes something else. So in the end all
it is are the hopes and fears of today. The future is what we
imagine it to be, our projections of what we wish today, of
how we see the world. Often these projections are dystopic,
a negative Utopia. The earth will bow under environmental
pollution; the big powers will throw around atom bombs and
babies will be born with two heads; we will live under Orwell's
Big brother and the only thing that is left is to look for the
nearest spaceship to the outer limits of the universe where we
will colonize new planets with the seeds of the old problems.
These were just very generally the tropes of Science Fiction.
But what about progress? What if things change for the bet-
ter? Now one could say that it would make for a very boring
story if there is no conflict and everything is just perfect. Still
this is the premise of the Future Archive and because it is
not a Science Fiction novel but an exploration of political and
artistic activism it works out all right.
Activism is the struggle for a better life. In the everyday far-
rago of work for money, projects, private life, media input and
what not, it is not always easy to remember what this goal is,
what the things are one fights for. What exactly has to change
in order to make life better? Thinking about these questions
is often awkward and embarrassing. Having ideals can eas-
ily be dismissed as naive and old-fashioned in our postmod-
ern times. The notion of one ideology under whose roof the
projects of world improvement could be subsumed is long
extinguished - which is all in all a good thing. Still, after the
years of postmodern irony a longing for utopia emerges in
the last years attested by the growing number of art works
and projects that deal with Science Fiction and Utopian pro-
jections.
The Future Archive is one of these projects. The basic premise
is simple: to remember the present from the future - and
hence to imagine the past from the future - a future where
something has changed for the better. The archive consists of
an online collection video interviews of various people - art-
ists, activists, theorists - who all employ this shift in perspec-
tive and imagine being their future selves and tell an inter-
viewer how it was in the past. It is important that something
changed for the better in these futures because this device
makes people talk about their hopes not their fears. By using
this trick the situation is fictionalized - we are not talking as
present selves but as imaginary future selves - and immedi-
ately a playfulness emerges that allows to play with ideas in-
stead of claiming the truth of what makes the world better.
It takes some getting used to it though. When I first encoun-
tered the Future Archive at a conference in Berlin, Manuela
Zechner, the initiator of the project, and her collaborator Anja
Kanngieser started their presentation 'in character' greeting
the audience as time travellers from the future. It was slightly
awkward as we didn't know how to react. We were not pre-
pared to slip into other roles than those of our present self.
Still the concept was fascinating and the slight insecurity it
created lead to an interesting discussion about what it exactly
is that people expect from conferences like the one we were
at. Later when we talked about the project Manuela tells me
how often the interview session have an therapeutic effect.
They open up possibilities. The conditions are not fixed, im-
mutable, but can be at least thought differently. That makes
Future Archive an optimistic project - futures that can be
thought differently can be changed. There are alternatives to
the commodified capitalist order, something that seems to be
forgotten or at least suppressed in the grind of the everyday.
Looking at the interviews that are available on the website
www.futurearchive.org one can see repeating patterns. The
basic premise that something changed for the better in the
future ironically often becomes a negative notion in the sense
that asking oneself what would happen if, for example, there
was no money, or no borders, no gender, no property. (That
seems to be something like a recurring idea at the moment -
the Berlin band Jeans Teams sings in their song "Das Zelt":
"No god / no state / no work / no money / my home is the
world", only that money and world rhymes in German: Geld
and Welt). The predictions of what replaces these old struc-
tures remain sketchy but the initial question focuses on the
present as past, not the future as present. That is not to say
that there are not moments of pure science fiction in the
interview - which is one part of what makes them amusing
to watch beside the practical intentions of becoming aware
of one's political and social wishes. In one interview the
two participants - Peter and Saul - go off on a tangent on
how much better it was in the past because there were still
things to fight for whereas now - in the future - all problems
are solved. This role-playing aspect makes the archive to be
more than just another social investigation.
INTERVIEWS (1)
Listening to some of the interviews, it is striking how rational
the futures of many people will be, how progressive. Under
the layers of possibilities the idea of progress still holds
some fascination cushioned through the experiences of mo-
dernity. There is no need to qualify the predictions though as
we are anyway only talking about fictional futures, possible
ideas about how it could be. The themes people talk about
in the archive are diverse and cover the preoccupations of
today: work, money, subsistence, intellectual property, but
also more basic concepts like language, the body, identity —
both national and gender -, the organisation of ideas in the
future and many more. At the moment there are about 40 in-
terviews online with many more to come. It's in the nature of
an archive never to be complete as it collects artefacts of the
past. Normally they are physical, touchable objects, books or
pictures. The Future Archive collects imaginary futures and
as the future does not and will never exist its stories form a
collection of impromptu oral science fiction disappearing in
the act of telling.
Valie Djordjevic is a writer, journalist and media worker living
in Berlin. Like most people in the cultural fields she works in
too many projects with not enough money. She is interested
in alternative and fictional worlds, copyright regimes and
gender politics. http://www. valid.de
LAW AS OF 2027
...what has happened is, that because of the large voluntary
manners in which people have started creating norms for
themselves - saying "we don't accept this just because this
is the norm you have created" - there has been a significant
move towards trying to get more bottom - up approaches to
law-making, there's a lot to be done still, let's meet again
in twenty years, and things might look very different, but in.
certain areas, things have completely changed, like in india,-
where i come from, there used to be extremely draconian leg-
islations- for example this law that criminalized homosexual-
ity, so that has gone, now there are "Igbt" marriages...
[■■■]
fcuO
o
CD
>
o
CD
www.futurearchive.org -lawrence
3
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
IN ROSTOCK, REMEMBE-
RING THE G8 AND AC-
TIVIST PRACTICES OF
2007
PI activism was perceived at the time by the general
public, or the wider populace i guess you could say, as be-
ing... often ineffective, radical beyond a sense of meaningful
politics, or so caught up in itself -with various groups purely
caught up in their own politics- that it would not be seen as
important, not as a concern for most, it was seen as some-
thing that some people would do, and maybe create some
small gains.
myself- i would say i became increasingly active, rather than
becoming an activist, mainly for my own reasons -i faced
many contradictions and conflicts within my own actions
and thoughts- and they continually progressed and changed,
but never went away- as to where i saw i could best operate,
or be active, to create the changes that i thought were desir-
able, or that others were also seeking.
activism was increasingly important because what we be-
lieved was necessary, the changing of conditions, was not
occurring through governments, or worse still at the time,
through increasingly large companies, or even single people
within companies- the bosses or the CEOs -that often had
more and more say in how things operated at that time - of-
ten more so than governments did themselves, i remember
at the time, and that had been going on for maybe twenty
years, there was a belief that neoliberalism or what we
called privatization of many spheres of life was actually a
benefit that would allow more individual choice, that would
allow people to operate however they thought was best in
order to become better off and more economically stable,
and that was supposedly at the time allowing borders to be
opened- but we saw that that was not the case at all.
activist groups within migration and many other fields were
around, and continually growing or expanding or disbanding
or forming or changing in response to the issues at the time.
..at that time i was feeling particularly helpless in what i
could do for a long time, and i knew the situations were
getting worse, but also that my awareness was growing
after leaving australia, and then moving to the US, travelling
through central america and through europe and talking to
migrants and groups and realizing the situation was similar
and worsening in all areas, some small ways in which i or-
ganized or worked against what we refered to as the "border
regime" at the time were through protest, we also suffered
a lot with our ignorance and language barriers at the time,
and growing up in a particularly stable and safe situation in
which english was seen as the norm led to further so-called
borders between different groups and limits to how we could
organize.
so i became involved in a global movement against border
controls, that made a specific recognition of, or distinciton
between, those who were supposedly in support of migrants
and helping the situation OF removing precarity but who
were unable to make the connection to deeply embed
ded practices of racism within immigration controls, and
between those making that extra leap to actually call for the
removal of immigration controls, while many groups were
calling for the reconfiguring of border controls or immigra-
tion controls, supposedly humanizing these controls other
groups were distinctly against controls in any form existing,
in any country, against any group or individual. that being
said, it was the beginning of a movement, and at the time
it didnt reap a particularly huge benefit- we were learning a
lot at that time, whether we liked it or not- of our mistakes,
and from those who were directly affected- at the time we
lacked a lot of knowledge about how we could act in solidar-
ity instead of acting on behalf of those who were affected,
on top of that, i found myself almost forced to volunteer
in a humanitarian organization, who had realized that the
situation was worsening rapidly, that governments were not
helping at all and that people were dying on a daily basis,
of all ages and nationalities, genders, political sidings- it
didnt matter at the time, these immigration controls wer-
ent distinguishing on peoples reasonings for fleeing, so we
found ourselves in direct need to provide aid and assistance
and medical care in an almost hopeless effort to stop these
deaths... at the time i think it was successful, although we
faced incredible repression from governements that were
supposedly in support of human rights, that simply were
not being fulfilled.
[...]
YOU ARE BORN AND IM-
MEDIATELY THEY CALL
YOU THINGS, AND THEN
YOU START CALLING
YOURSELF THINGS .. .
PI yeah it was a long time ago, but... i still remember
that when somebody was born, there was only the decision
between boy and girl - so they told me i was a girl, for exam-
ple, and that was a big decision for your whole life somehow,
because you were raised that way- so if they told you that you
were a boy, you were raised in the way of a boy- and there
were a lot of attributes associated with this word "boy" or
"girl".
and it was also very different from the health point of view...
because not only was your identity already decided upon
when you were born, but also your health, with the genetic
pool you had... you had no chance to have no cancer, if your
mother had cancer.
PI i remember this time as that of a confusion of identities.,
all these constructions of religion, of non-religion or of athe-
ism, and of modernism- all these things, they were crackling
and breaking down, and people realized there was nothing
that you could identify with anymore, so they were struggling
very much to find somewhere they could belong, or some-
thing that they could call themselves, so - before there was
all the new ideas that we live from now, and that we teach our
childern now, people were very focused on finding an author-
ity, it was a big "searching time"...
P2 "authority?"
PI ..authority, yes, i know its an old word., it's like: if you
don't feel what your self is, if you don't think and feel your-
self but you are always trying to find someone else to tell
you what you feel and to tell you what to do. so it was like.,
being controlled, but in a very lustful way. being controlled to
not have to control yourself- people were searching for a kind
of thing that they would trust in, trust to such a degree that
they would also do what this thing was saying, so they obeyed
ideas like religion, and some peoples plans... that was a horri-
ble thing, now we don't have to do that anymore, because we
have a different educational system, back then, people were
really told from their birth on: what they had to do, and what
they had to say- today that's very different.
[...]
PI well, what was also very different back then- i can re-
member now because we were talking so much about the
past- it was this thing called "money", it was part of this
thinking system of giving and taking, it was like a symbol
for giving and taking, people were working and living for get-
ting this money, and then they could receive things for their
money, it started to change when people were digitizing this
money, then it stopped being like numbers - they were count-
ing this money in numbers, that were printed on paper - but
it started to run on what was back then called computer sys-
tems, that was the beginning of the dissolution of money.
[...]
[...]
www.futurearchive.org - budge
www.futurearchive.org -stefanie
4 ■
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
FUTURE IS A VERB
BEGINNING TO OUTLINE A
FUTURE ARCHIVE METHODOLOGY
The process of social constitution of a reality beyond capital-
ism can only be the creation, the production of other dimen-
sions of living, of other modes of doing and relating, valuing
and judging, and co-producing livelihoods. All the rest, reg-
ulations, reforms, 'alternatives', the party, elections, social
movements, 'Europe' and even 'revolution', are just words
with no meaning if not taken back to the question of other
dimensions of living. -Massimo De Angelis [1]
Project and process description:
The future archive is a project that issues a series of respons-
es to the problem of how to perform futures. It engages inter-
view- conversations that are set in possible times and spaces
to come, which two or more people performatively inhabit
as proposed versions of futurity. From there, contemporary
society is remembered. Upon every conversation, a different
future is at stake.
Aiming to offer spaces for carefully developing vocabularies
and gestures which might point towards potential ways of
thinking, acting and existing, the project encourages articu-
lations of hopes and desires for future ways of co/existing,
negotiating the space between a remembered present and a
potential future, as well as facing up to the problematics of
the proposals and imaginaries at hand. With the questions of
transformation and the social as its starting point, the future
archive generates a map of divergent scenarios and tactics,
focusing on connections as well as points of disagreement
between interlocutors.
While there is an interviewing party and an interviewed, what
is engaged is working together to make a movement towards
what could be/ go beyond contemporary language, problems,
politics, etc- never a great success, but more of a negotiation-
play with imagination and responseabilities. Conversations
are video recorded and become part of an online platform
that acts as archive as well as space for exchange and discus-
sion, offering all material as open content.
At futurearchive.org, all material (audio/video/text etc) gen-
erated in the framework of the project becomes available for
download, commentary and non-commercial use.
In 2007, the future archive brings forth a series of collabora-
tively curated activities, pertaining to thematic strands within
the project, that take the form of discussions, performances,
screenings, and so forth. In a relevant institution or open
space, collective transformation of a present space into a site
of futurity is attempted.
The future archive:
subversive potentials in
remembering and knowing
Future is not a noun, it's a verb. -Bruce Sterling
We would like to take this statement as a basis for thinking
about knowledge as verb.
The future archive stages divergent rehearsals and
formulations of strategic means, through which the transfer-
ence and transformation of ideas, knowledges and modes of
relation may be practised. Such rehearsals are essential to
any micro-transfiguration of present socio-political situations
(of Empire). The methodology articulated through the future
archive is, in part, an attempt to explore and experiment with
the ways in which we consider, construct and enact our rela-
tionships to, and within, the world. This kind of questioning
is important to us in our imagined transformations of soci-
ety because we, individually and collectively, make our worlds
through our consensus and participation, through our insur-
rection and negotiation.
The process actualised by the future archive is to do
with knowledge in the sense of "verbal" knowledge, of actively
"knowing ones knowledge" at a given point, knowing its situ-
atedness and what one can and cannot do with it. Perceiving
knowledge as a quite flexible and virtual playing field within
which to manoeuvre and come to act, as opposed to con-
flating knowledge with pre-accumulated information or de-
terminist factuality. The conversational format utilised by the
project aims to establish spaces for sharing ideas and strate-
gies in order for them to bring about new modes of question-
ing, imagining and knowing. The delineation of a discursive
and epistemological field is the crucially difficult process at
the basis of these conversations, which reveal knowledges as
open and translatable bases for action and movement.
On the process
The process undertaken by the future archive consists of con-
versations (individual/ group, formal/ informal) that experi-
ment with lateral information sharing and creating. Building
on a variety of methods (from future studies/ science fic-
tion/ documentary practice/ human geography etc), different
modes of constructing knowledge and information are facili-
tated, and the parameters of knowledge as empirical or in-
formational "facts" are challenged in favour of a re-conceptu-
alisation of knowledge transmission as a process of sharing
modalities for negotiation and understanding. What comes to
be shared in the exchange of questions and answers is not
just knowledges and information as they exist previous to the
encounter, but what may be envisioned jointly (not necessar-
ily in equilibrium). Questioning and learning occurs horizon-
tally, co-relationally, detached from a sovereign position of
expertise defined by diplomas, degrees, and self-gratifying
vocabularies- these might no longer exist in an imagined fu-
ture. The knowledge that is generated through the process
of the conversation or interview operates outside of conven-
tional schemas of education or pedagogy, and is also hardly
locatable in the sense of a strict philosophical discourse. It
is knowledge that emerges through a process of sharing and
reciprocity of ideas and hopes. It is a knowledge of imagi-
native possibilities in which divergent kinds of knowledges,
tactics and aspirations for alternate ways of living can be
related, transformed and transferred - not as fixed ideas, but
as possible gestures.
Re-membering and practice
The conversations hope to provide a modality through which
to creatively challenge our assumptions on how the world may
be, to bring about different, multiplicitous and fragmented
narratives of potential futurities. Methodologically, this hap-
pens through inviting participants to imagine themselves in a
potential future, recalling the present-as-past.
Initially, there is some gesture of translation from
the present into the future. This predominantly consists of
opening remarks made by the interviewing party which seek
to situate the conversation, for instance: "Welcome to this
future. I have looked through the archives and found that in
2007, you were involved in what was then known as 'activ-
ism'. In this present context, it is no longer quite clear what
this term meant at that point, and I would like to ask you to
give a bit of context and explain..."
This is succeeded by an exploration of personal (po-
litical, social, cultural) ideas and practice via questions such
as "what did activism mean back then, to you personally; and
how was it popularly understood?" Although the discussion
often begins by isolating a key area of interest or relevance,
within the process of speaking and interacting a high level of
flexibility regarding the potential trajectories of conversation
is retained, allowing for other lines of conversation to emerge.
The question-answer play encourages an open space of dis-
course within which there can be concentration upon one or
several persons, practices, ideas and hopes.
Tactical remembering
The questions posed by the interviewer oscillate along a level
of naivety and inexpectancy (especially in the initial phases
of conversation) by asking for explanation and contextualiza-
tion. This is done without a claim to truth as such, and any
desire for truth is negated in favour of the discovery of sites
of potentiality and subversion. In creatively questioning the
meaning of concepts and notions from within an imagined
future, a different epistemological situation arises, which
then has to be navigated or again subverted through some
tactics of remembering. At the same time as being directed
at the interviewee, the questions illicit a response from the
interviewer; they help her, confront her, ask her to present
herself in the past and as such come to show herself in the
future. During the course of the interview, questions or com-
ments may come to act more antagonistically, challenging
the interviewee/s and interviewer/s and further prompting
new shifts towards radical images and understandings.
The process operates on this level of language and reiterating
concepts as much as on the level of praxis. The interviewed
will (be encouraged to) come up with praxes that correspond
to the shifts in language that have been proposed. This imag-
ining is a parallel process that runs throughout the conversa-
tion: a struggle for images and praxes that might illustrate
how a different understanding (of the social, politics, the
creative, economic etc.) might function in material terms.
As the discussion moves from structured to more in-
formal (eventually shifting to a point when both parties have
reached some limit of what they find constructively imagi-
nable there and then) the form of interrelationship becomes
more and more speculative, joking and colloquial until even-
tually the process is recognized as finished.
Tactical knowledges
It is clear that through this methodology a radical depar-
ture is made from historical conceptions of education and
knowledge production and dissemination, especially institu-
tional knowledges. While the mechanisms of knowledge, and
their relation to power, have been rigorously deconstructed
over the past 50 years, little has changed in the context of
educational apparatuses. Hierarchies have remained fixed,
with the capacity to hold and transfer knowledge legitimat-
ed through a system of accredited expertise. The teacher is
easily distinguished from the student, the philosopher from
the dilettante, the economist from the gambler. This is not
to suggest however that this kind of knowledge is the only
recognised form. There are many trajectories of knowledge
choreographed around different practices and contexts, ex-
periences, gestures and memories. But these knowledges
are rarely dominant, rarely appear in media spotlights or on
lecterns for having attained specialist status. This distinction
is predicated on a particular construction of power and vis-
ibility, still prevalent in an era when technology has made it
viable for almost anyone to make their knowledges and opin-
ions accessible. The future archive is an attempt to subvert
these hierarchical mechanisms of knowledge by placing them
into dialogical interplay with memories, affects, and perfor-
mative imaginings or "fictions". What is at stake might be
called an active exchange of tactical, navigational and/ or
creative potential. In working towards an understanding and
experience of certain "fictions" in relation to "facts", a strug-
gle to gain ground in such playing fields or spaces arises
from which certain potentials enable through the conflict find
resonance. This is necessarily "unsuccessful", impartial and
troublesome as a process, and irresolvable as a problem.
The kinetic and sometimes discordent knowledge that arises
through this process, through the interactions between the
interviewee/s and interviewer/s, and through the interactions
between various expertises', experiences and interests, is one
that only obliquely resembles conventional understandings of
knowledge. The kind of conversation described may provoke
a significant learning process for those involved. As previous-
ly posited, what is transmitted is not knowledge predicated
on a consensual ground and a "common understanding" (or
in other cases, specialized understanding) of discrete, total-
izing units of empirically or otherwise agreed upon facts or
information. What appears are rather possible or speculative
knowledges. The knowledges that emerge are unknown be-
fore the encounter: the conversation is a co-relational creative
process rather than what one would traditionally consider as
participating in a hierarchically educational discursive econo- bo
my. Previous knowledge's come into contact with one another ^
to become the condition for their own transgression, meta-
CD
morphosed in the process of conversation by way of perfor- >
mative/ assertive statements that bring into reality a set of '~
possibilities. 0
In light of proposals such as that of De Angelis which argue ^
that what must be strived for are alternative ways of living ^-
and organizing that coincide with our political positionalities _^
- a performative project such as the future archive consti- =5
tutes an attempt to offer creative ways of speaking about ^
such alternatives and testing them through the dispositiv of ^
subversive memory. The future archive methods are predicat- ^
ed upon processes of reciprocity and play that disregard the ^
hyper-capital of specialized knowledge by collectively and ex-
perimentally participating in the exchange and trans-forma-
tion of such knowledge and its situation. The jointly asserted
and engaged vision of possible futures come about through
a set of movements and tactical/ strategical decisions which
interlocutors come up with and propose to one another. This
open, collaborative and re-creational approach to discourses
hopes to allow us to, following David Harvey, "intervene in the
way knowledge is produced and constituted at the particular
sites where a localized power-discourse prevails." [2]
The future archive methodology may be seen to resemble
more a game than a conventional educational situation, and
we would suggest that it mainly utilizes knowledge as an im-
perative towards movement and participation. Our proposal
of knowledge as a verb can be seen as one made possible
through shifting of virtual and actual terrains provoked by the
acts of remembering, guessing and discussing. The intention
of such verbal dealings with knowledge is not a consensus.
There is no desire to negate disjunction or rupture. As the
project website illustrates in its architecture, the assembly
and combination of such conversations in the framework of
an online archive is meant to simply offer a mutable topology
and space for questioning, relating and making visible ideas,
so that they may come to be useful in various ways. For it is
through those discoveries of momentary overlaps, and the
continued conversations on points of divergence, that partici-
pants can proceed together into unknown areas of specula-
tion. And from this we can try to make spaces for thought
that can range from pragmatic to Utopian, but in any case
affect the way we remember ourselves in the present.
Manuela Zechner and Anja Kanngieser
References
[1] Massimo De Angelis The Beginning of History: Value
struggles and Global Capital (London and Ann Arbor, Pluto
Press: 2007) p. 1
[2] David Harvey The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge,
MA and Oxford, UK, Blackwell Publishers: 1990) p. 46.
Anja Kanngieser is a phd candidate at the University of
Melbourne, Australia. She has been working on examining
the intersections between aesthetics and activism,
specifically german activist groups that use aesthetic
techniques as a means of articulating their dissent. She is
also involved in the future archive project, and works with
installation and radio, http://www.non-specialist.net/
Manuela Zechner coordinates the future archive project and
works with Critical Practice Research Cluster at Chelsea
College of Art and Design, London, as well as being engaged
in various other collaborative projects in the fields of
new media/ art and education. Her current work centers
around archives, dialogical practices and future studies.
www.futurearchive.org, www.thisappearance.org, www.
criticalpracticechelsea. org
6
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
DAS ZUKUNFTSARCHIVistein
langfristiges Projekt das auf Interview-Gesprachen basiert,
die in der Zukunft stattfinden. Zwei oder mehr Menschen
begeben sich in einen performativen Raum der Zukunft,
wie er von einem oder mehreren Teilnehmern vorgeschla-
gen wird, um sich von dort aus an zeitgenossische Gesells-
chaftsf ormen zu erinnern.
Das spezifische Gespwrachsszenario schafft einen Raum,
in dem vorsichtig Vokabulare und Syntax von potentiel-
len Denk- und Seinsweisen entwickelt werden konnen. Im
Kontext einer entstehenden Realitat werden von Gesprach
zu Gesprach verschiedene Anstatze und Sprechweisen aus-
gehandelt. Zwischen Interviewer und Interviewtem wird
eine gemeinsame Bewegung jenseits von zeitgenossischem
Diskurs, Problemen und Politiken versucht. Der Lokus die-
ser Gesprache sind immer Praxen (seien das kiinstlerische,
aktivistische, soziale, wissenschaftliche Praxen) und die
Projektion einer Praxis in eine Zukunft, auf die diese wun-
schenswert gewirkt hat.
Das Projekt besteht aus einem online Archiv sowie zahlre-
ichen Parallelinitiativen, die entstandenes Material in ver-
schiedenen Formaten weiterentwickeln oder befragen.
Was im Rahmen des Zukunftsarchivs entsteht, wird mit
einer Open Content Lizenz versehen, und steht somit
jedem/jeder zur nicht-kommerziellen Verwendung zu Ver-
fiigung. Auf www.futurearchive.org wird samtliches Mate-
rial veroffentlicht und zum download freigestellt. Auf diese
Weise tragt das Projekt zur Erarbeitung einer Art (Sprach- /
Vernetzungs-) Protokoll oder Baukasten bei, der fur Forsc-
hung sowie Praxis -im weitesten Sinne- relevant werden
kann. Das Zukunftsarchiv wurde von Manuela Zechner
initiiert und wird von ihr koordiniert. Hauptanliegen des
Projektes ist es, Kontexte in denen das Projekt Form findet
kritisch zu reflektieren und Formen von Zusammenarbeit
und Organisation zu finden, die nicht hierarchisch oder
profitorientiert operieren.
Haupt-kollaborateurlnnen sind Anja Kanngieser; sowie
Cinzia Cremona, Neil Cummings und Mary Anne Francis
als Critical Practice Research Cluster.
INTERVIEWS (2)
THAT WAS FEAR
yeah back then we used to., most of our feelings and re-
sponses to situations were controlled by these glands which
we had in our brains, which would release different chemicals
in different situations, fear was this kind of instant hit... i
think it was a mixture of adrenaline, which we still have now,
mixed with another chemical, you'd feel your heart beating,
you'd feel this pressure on your chest, and you'd become
more alert., and if you saw it in someone else you would see
their eyes darting around, it would just be released so you
could have a quick response to a difficult instant situation,
so that before you could think and logically respond, it would
make you act and do something, we used to also have this
fear which was more long-term, linked to what we used to
call ambition., if you were worried that something was not
going to work out in the long run, it would — i mean maybe it
was a slow release of what i was talking about earlier, but —
you would have this slow nagging feeling that something was
gonna go wrong, it used to keep people up at night and it
used to scare them.
ii
THE FUTURE ARCHIVE.,
project that issues a series of responses to the problem of
how to perform divergent futures. It engages interview- con-
versations that are set in possible times and spaces to come,
which two or more people performatively inhabit as proposed
versions of futurity. From there, contemporary society is re-
membered. Upon every conversation, a different future is
negotiated via a discursive method that borrows from tech-
niques of interview as well as dialogue and free speculation.
Aiming to offer spaces for carefully developing vocabularies
and gestures which might point towards potential ways of
thinking, acting and existing, the project encourages articu-
lations of hopes and desires for future ways of co/existing,
negotiating the space between a remembered present and a
potential future, as well as facing up to the problematics of
the proposals and imaginaries at hand. The locus of this is
always practice (be it theoretical, activist, scientific, social
practice etc), which is cast into a possible future upon which
it is imagined to have impacted in a desirable way. With the
questions of transformation and the social as its starting
point, the future archive draws out a map of divergent sce-
narios and tactics, focusing on connections as well as points
of disagreement between interlocutors and conversations.
While there is an interviewing party and an interviewed,
what is engaged is working together to mwake a movement
towards what could be/ go beyond contemporary language,
problems, politics, etc, in playful negotiation with imagina-
tion and responseabilities. Conversations are video recorded
and become part of an online platform that acts as archive as
well as space for exchange and discussion, offering all mate-
rial as open content.
At futurearchive.org, all material (audio/video/text etc) gen-
erated in the framework of the project becomes available for
download, commentary and non-commercial use.
The future archive brings forth collaboratively curated ac-
tivities, pertaining to thematic research initiatives within the
project, that take the form of discussions, performances,
screenings, interview labs, and so forth. As a project it is co-
ordinated and initiated by Manuela Zechner, setting out to be
reflexive and critical of the contexts it operates within (not
only the art world but increasingly pedagogical or critical
social contexts) and of its collaborative and organizational
forms. Please post or email your feedback and criticizm if
you find problems with this.
Main collaborators for 2007 include Anja Kanngieser; Cinzia
Cremona, Neil Cummings and Mary Anne Francis as Critical
Practice Research Cluster.
MEDICAL INTERVENTIONS
we had a sort of self-vindicating relationship with the outside
world... or an external reality, transcending the flesh was very
much part of getting rid of that idea - or actually maybe em-
bodying the flesh once again but thinking about it differently,
a lot of the medical interventions at the time, and a lot of
new technologies at the time very much treated the body as
an object, a thing, that was unto itself- whereas you could not
accomplish the feats that... you could not achieve that kind
of scientific success without a series of instruments actually
enacting that kind of reality, and this is something that was
quite missed in the scientific research that was going on at
the time, it treated the human body as this bounded object.
O future archive : projects ©
projects
back to the archive
The ''uture archive hosts collaborative projects that engage its
discursive method towards research and conversation in
various 'ields.
One o f these is the development o ; a methodology that works
along the lines o ; dialogue, imagin[in)g and remembering
that can come to act towards pedagogical, artistic as well as
activist practices.
The -indings o ; these projects are to be published on
''uturearchive.org in due time.
The future archive project continues as long as there is interest
in this kind o ; research. If you would like to suggest to
undertake a specific strand o f research in this context, just get
in touch.
Below, you find a list of current and past research projects, in
progress:
o The articulation of resistance:
activism and activist speech
practices
o Critical Practice
o Self-Organization
o Audience, listening
http /.,' futurearchive.org; archive
^ tultrt jieIv.p #>prtL
2007
CtMfflf
° ojguar ]*Vk Ps^ownu Aril frmjm. RainL Rune*
lumnw Hnhwiltv: pwwikrtvi. 'escich and inlaws
p-eriarJ vDuna c 1 itf ngartiiifloii
* Zr MpHrtw rrtdoctoow. irtrfcfcfcon k *n*rttm ai
[|*k1icMr H#f fail Qdl Aurtta
<=■ Dctber 'crt-iimrtog puMcata*- cround Mi» etc***
* Qefcfe*r (rfGMrift m^t-miti ptfarinQ qrh magpnn*
AijiVan fp'ij-n. Cjfaj ■^v 1 " 1
* IB-VJ docDTT*» Ml/, ^pnufnp pi Tm Kik» TmaWm in
lft*Chl. ht^oflw wilh csllpcfv* I LA
rwwniw 3CFJ* rwfrl rn«*n!fv1^n nmrl r". r(-J ■-
ccrri*nrrtr'-n j\ Nan -S? B-ctflllxi lufami ur EHilnr>c«
Ipr rnofB irtlci kMp U ipi ^ ng pr M-npl -i:iny*a
ongoing events
imy-sing h. o tmt\m td cmiwii uil wii lafctra p'czo kriprtinla ax
Crib^od ^n^icB •m—m/r- farn(| d'arrlp^d ^HMSMi
I* you hJsh -la attend o* Eroowa. ■mal manu
post events
QUCfiLAA C ili hj Esvd r-o'o-n wen L^-d-tn ifmwcfi
* i^JJth tfr+mHoA4* pi CWm Cp**g» L*rtd*fl, h^*
Stag Idpn^pnwnl o^S ™*np| a'Cimd M^hxr.^
THAT WAS LOGOCENTRISM
it was basically about metaphysical security, it manifested
itself in various ways: in god, or in truth, or in science, or in
logic, or in reason, or in technology., as a way of providing
a kind of metaphysical security, it was a way of providing
people with the impression that they were secure, because
they were in possesion of the truth, or the law, or the way of
controling the world around them- either controlling it lin-
guistically or controlling it literally with tools.
ii
8
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
(This article invites you to share our mode of inquiry, to mo-
bilize and amplify this practice. We present you with a kit and
question the gap between you and the page or screen you
are reading from. 1 We invite you to re-speak Queen Mother
Moore with the tools and prompts provided here, along with
resources from your own abilities and histories.)
I AM GOING TO TELL
YOU SOMETHING NO ONE
ELSE CAN TELL YOU WHO
ASN'T THERE. . .
A kit for speaking and re-speaking
by BLW
Video recording: Queen Mother Moore, recorded at Green Ha-
ven Federal Prison by the People's Communication Network,
1973.
Speech transcript Queen Mother Moore, see end of text
Speaker
Audience
Platform
Amplification
Recording device
BLW is huddled around the monitor, three women watching
an unauthorized dub of a recording on the sidelines of a con-
ference about radical media. We contemplate the speech and
the tape, and the electrical push-pull created by the video's
ability to simultaneously recall the moment when Queen
Mother Moore addressed inmates of a federal prison, while
also calling out the vast distance between that moment and
this one.
BLW proposes "re-speaking, " the act of committing to mem-
ory and reciting a recorded speech as a practice-based em-
bodied method of inquiry into the history of radical politics
and our positioning as subjects today We find that by holding
archival speech at a critical distance, we can also investigate
the productive role of media in those politics and positions.
Our interest is in the text and the conditions and implications
of the recording, speech and the conditions and implications
of utterance. We are looking for resonance— not theater. We
are looking for <speech> beyond the limitations of the re-
cording.
Watching the tape again, BLW wonders what it meant to
make the speech today and what it means to have preserved
it. As close as we move in, we are still watching and listening
to Queen Mother Moore speak from inside the tube. We won-
der if there is another way to "play back," to move beyond
televisual enchantment in search of political agency. We are
interrogating a gap that pertains to radical media, militant
speech, public memory, and the positioning of subjects.
We ask ourselves if we have any experience with radical
speech, radical politics, in our daily lives. What are the cus-
toms and practices of radical speech in your own history to
refer to? 2
1. SPEAKER - a person who speaks
In civil rights activist Queen Mother Moore's stirring speech
she directly addresses the problem of empowerment as an
embodied and political process that is shared: the transfer
and redistribution of power among the heretofore powerless.
BLW is longing for a moment that we were not a part of, and
that even now, we might be excluded from.
Everybody's gun came out, and this is what they said,
"speak, Garvey speak! Speak, Garvey!" with the guns in
their hands. "Speak Garvey, speak!" And Garvey said, "As I
was saying...."
We want to know how we might be called to speak, in what
ways might the actions of others enable us to speak. "Speak
Speak!!!" In what ways can you no longer be silent?
Our impulse is to re-tell the story of Queen Mother Moore.
The story she tells is about Marcus Garvey in New Orleans,
in which an entire community arms themselves and success-
fully opposes the power that seeks to silence their leader. Her
words, "Speak, Garvey, Speak" are an invitation and a com-
mand, marking an imperative responsibility or obligation:
Garvey must respond, he cannot be silent.
How can you respond to such a command, given the anxi-
ety and difficulty of speaking, what are the experiences and
practices that may enable you to respond?
/ wanna give you a little example of the story of Marcus
Garvey.
I wanna tell you something that nobody else could tell you
who hadn't lived long enough to be here today, to experi-
ence this is to tell you. Those who were there. ..down in New
Orleans, when the police told Marcus Garvey he couldn't
speak to us, and prevented him from coming to speak to us
one night.
We understand that when Queen Mother Moore tells her
story, it is as a witness, as someone who was there. Her
testimonial is not just a telling-it is a summoning,
a conjuring. 3
Her breath is a vehicle that unleashes and mobilizes power
within the prison courtyard, in the same way that Garvey's
audience used their guns to physically enable the transfer of
power in New Orleans fifty-three years earlier. What avenues
do we have for the transfer of power?
We ask if a potential for mobilizing has been swallowed by
watching. We recall what we have witnessed in our own lives.
How can we use these recollections as a provocation for
ourselves, to speak about what we have witnessed?
Is it ok to speak imperfectly or clumsily? What are the ways to
learn or to build your capacity?
Queen Mother Moore suggests power is collectively generated
(seized), so this you" is always the collective you, a commu-
nity of speaking subjects where all can be summoned if need
should call. We look within our past experience for the kinds
of solidarities that can produce mobilizing language.
As you speak the words of others, what is it that is moving
through you? You might ask yourself if the saying of these
words increases your commitment to programmatically
unifying action or is it an unfamiliar encounter like trying on
a strange costume?
This discomfort is a measure of our distance from radical ex-
perience. This distance might feel like a kind of pain beyond '
failure or inadequacy a kind of anguish, despair.
Is this pain also the measure of our limits-of our commit-
ment, or courage? Why is it that the acts of watching and
speaking produce opposite effects?
Watching = euphoric, elated, inspired, safe // Speaking = ^
painful, scary. Silence=death. H —
CO
What can we understand about our distance from the event,
from the experiences of which it is a part? What kinds of
erasures are perpetrated by speaking these words? And is
there not still the possibility of erasure if we banish these
words to the archive?
2. A PLATFORM - a place from which to
speak
A conference we attend gives us an opportunity to explore
our frustration with the seeming impossibilities, but also the
possibilities, of radical speech today. We feel urgency about
speaking out about conditions that surround and affect us,
and we are given, quite literally, a comfortable place to stand
and talk. In a larger sense, we are standing on the platform
of this moment in which it is so difficult for radicality to have
any sort of a foothold. Queen Mother Moore stands behind a
podium in the courtyard of Green Haven prison, in front of
the inmates and invited visitors and also in front of the prison
guards. She stands in front of, and faced by, both those she
seeks to mobilize and those who are agents of repressive
power. She stands in a prison courtyard at a time when young
men are returning from Vietnam and the next stage of mili-
tary deployment is domestic.
Stand on a crate, a balcony, or in front of a line. Stand in
front of people, close to them, or far away. Stand-alone.
Stand with others. Stand in a classroom, a park, an office
building, museum, a grocery store, a safe place, or unfa-
miliar one. Stand in front of those you wish to mobilize and
those who wish to silence you. Look for your possible plat-
forms. Consider the location from which-and within which-
you speak. Speaking requires deep engagement. Tap into
your potential as aspeaker. Tap into your beliefs, practices
and experiences. Find an ideological ground to stand upon.
This distance between her experience and ours gains clarity
as we imagine her as a model. Who the hell is our model?
BLW begins with recitations in an apartment, a bus in Chi-
cago. We struggle against our comfortable silence. We are not
accustomed to stridency. We recognize how Queen Mother
Moore stands upon and within a lifetime of practice in com-
munity organizing, personal and collective practices of politi-
cal struggle. The deeply scarring racial violence experienced
in early childhood and her encounter with Garvey and the Afri-
canist movement are defining moments in her life and work.
What other kinds of platforms support speaking? The
Speakers' Bureau is a ubiquitous structure for the distribu-
tion of speakers. Speakers' Bureaus take many forms, from
business ventures that operate as talent agencies for neo-
liberal motivational speech, to the public educational face
of institutions. There are Speakers' Bureaus for the poor,
the homeless, and the Left. You can join one, or start one
together. Train together in order to explore practices and
traditions that cultivate and enable speakers and oratory.
She stands within a history of oratory but she undoubtedly
encountered opposition from the very communities for which
she advocated, for speaking the unspeakable, for her insist-
ence on naming and indicting all forms of inequality, for rock-
ing the boat.
o
03
O
9
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
The structural landscape of systematic oppression and deni-
gration against which she always stood would not be unfa-
miliar to her today. BLW considers the concentration and
deployment of power in our daily lives. We look for places in
our silence from which we can begin, recognizing that we are
■ you are always situated in a landscape of power.
What is the history and use of speaking freely? Do you need
to follow the G-8 to speak or can you find targets in your
immediate landscape to directly interpolate, with others, or
alone? For those of us coming of age after the systematic
elimination of the left in the late '60's and 70's, is there a
higher tolerance of silence, or of self-censorship?
Today, public utterance might push us to the border of
legality. Moore's platform is insurgent, revolutionary-a call
to action that could be criminalized today as an incitement
to terrorism. What are the implications of this call to arms
today? Where are today's platforms for revolutionary change?
How do we understand the structures of power and oppres-
sion today, where is it that we can stand to face them?
3. AMPLIFICATION - a way to make
your voice heard
We think about the microphone, the vehicle that carries her
voice across the prison courtyard. Her speech is emphatic,
commanding. It is further amplified through rhetorical devic-
es such as repetition, modulation. Her speech has increased
resonance because she is speaking as a witness - no one else
can tell the story in this way, because no one else was there.
She is a kind of diaphragm herself, an amplification device
that converts one kind of signal or vibration into another—
one form of power into another.
The police— knew they would have been slaughtered in that
hall that night— because nobody was afraid to die. You've got
to be prepared to lose your life in order to gain your life.
You will need to find a way to make your voice heard. Shout
loudly, or use a bullhorn. Stand very closely to others. Listen
closely. What, if anything, makes this difficult? Is there a
distance or divide over which your words cannot travel?
In practicing outspokenness, BLW produces eruptions of
sound that are unintelligible.
What is politically potent about the grunts we emit on our
way to language? Is there political potential in amplifying the
struggle to speak, our failure, anxiety, fear. Despair? Sound
is a dynamic vibration-can these dynamics "do" something?
We feel what it does to our bodies to speak out, when we do
so for a long time. Can these vibrations become converted
into other forms of energy? How do you experience this
transformation? Can this energy be channeled, transferred?
4. AN AUDIENCE - someone to speak
to / with
The video depicts her speaking outside before a group of
young African Americans. As the camera pans around, we see
other features of the courtyard space where she is speaking;
it is grey and filled with sun. Her audience is on folding chairs
and behind them, tall walls made of concrete, a guard tower.
Moore is addressing inmates and their guests at the Green
Haven federal penitentiary in upstate NY. 4 The three of us,
as BLW, began our recitations in the places of our work. We
were invited to do a project at Pilot TV in Chicago. From a
stage, we addressed a modest group of artists and activists,
gathered to experiment with the possibilities of radical me-
dia today. They sit on sofas and folding chairs and listen, not
without some discomfort.
Look for an audience, for someone to address. Construct an
audience. Appropriate an audience. Invite others to speak
with you. Consider your relationship, and theirs, to struc-
tures of power, your relationship and theirs to others, not
present, who have transferred power to you and the obliga-
tion to transform/redistribute it.
Now how did we do that? How do you go determined to keep
the powers that be from preventing your leader from speak-
ing to you? How do you do that?
Moore has been invited by Think Tank, a prisoners' group or-
ganized around skill building for community empowerment.
In this moment the nation-wide prisoners' rights movement
is intensifying. Think Tank's organizing is part of their com-
mitment to deepening this movement through a conscious
inquiry into the relationship between conditions in the black
communities and high rates of incarceration. Queen Mother
Moore has herself been instrumental for years in this broader
movement for dignity and justice. The yard is full of people
who are developing strategies for educating and empowering
themselves. This site is the place of activation and exchange.
This is where the "kit" is activated through your re-speaking.
People are organizing themselves to hear her speech and to
speak about the functions of power.
How does speaking with others become a way to understand
how power is functioning within all of our lives? We can't all
claim to be in the same position in relation to power and
designations of authority, but speaking with each other is a
way to understand these structures, and the ways we all im-
plicated in various structures of power and powerlessness.
The relationship between speaker and audience is established
through Moore's reflections on the power of speech itself: the
witness of a speech later becomes a speaker, who speaks to
someone else, who then becomes a witness who can then
speak. Thus, power is transmitted through a redistribution of
the agency and the mandate to speak through collectivity.
Brothers
We came here to tell you to come home to us.
We want you. We came here to invite you and to let you
know that you are not alone and to let you know that you
have brothers and sisters who are waiting for you and who
are fighting for your return and who are preparing places to
receive you.
And we don't want you to feel rejected. You've been reject-
ed out of the man's society.
But you are not rejected out of black society
Consider your relationship to the history of the civil rights
movements, the history of radical or militant movements
in the US. In what ways can you invite others to reconsider
their status as criminals, outsiders, and outcasts? Who
could you speak to and who could you be speaking with.
What shared problems are being manufactured or produced
in the spaces you inhabit? What is being overlooked or sen-
tenced to silence?
The expectation that Moore's listeners will participate in a
transference of power is implicit in her exhortation to her
audience that they return home empowered citizens. She is
charging them with a responsibility to effect radical change
once they get home. She charges them to address the forces
of social determination that distribute property, that desig-
nate theft, that assign criminality. Power is being transmitted
through speech but the power of speech is not the goal.
You couldn't steal brothers.
You can't steal you can't steal from a white man— all that
you can do is take back from him.
APPLAUSE
It's all you can do because everything that he's got— every-
thing, everything the white man has, everything, he stole it
from you.
Everything, he stole it from you—
You are not the criminals.
You are not the criminals.
Queen Mother Moore speaks to her audience, a group of in-
carcerated people, about an instance in which a group of citi-
zens "came armed. "
Can speech itself be violent? Is it possible to see various
contemporary instances of violence and militancy as acts
of speech or communication? What are the various uses of
violence today? What are the various forms of legitimated
violence, and what forms of violence are criminalized?
We ask whether speech has the potential to unmask violence.
But as we begin to re-materialize this speech before an audi-
ence, we are forced to confront the removal of the person tell-
ing the story. Speaking the words of Queen Mother Moore is
ethically complicated and potentially offensive. Re-speaking,
and re-membering might function as acts of over-speaking,
over- writing or erasure. If white bodies speak the words of a
black civil rights leader, is this an act of stealing? Are we con-
tinuing a history of theft, of colonizing language, homelands,
bodies, and identities? Her words remind us of the naked
violence of this story.
You are not the criminals.
I'd like to ask you, have you stolen anybody's heritage?
Have you stolen children from their mothers and sold them
on the slave block?
Have you stolen wealth from the land and have you stolen
whole countries?
5. A RECORDING DEVICE - something
that witnesses and remembers speech
Queen Mother Moore's speech was recorded by People' Com-
munication Network, a radical video collective. This was the
first time an alternative video collective was allowed to docu-
ment activities inside the walls of the prison. The accessibil-
ity and immediacy of the video medium in the early 1970's
ushered in a period of techno-activism: an optimistic, some-
times Utopian, movement that saw video as means of radical-
izing the relationship between spectator and spectacle. The
medium was the message, and the message was meant to
reinvigorate participatory democratic culture. 5 BLW records
our experiments as an exploration of the role of this device
as a repository of history and as a tool that participates both
in the mobilization and demobilization of speech.
While Queen Mother Moore's speech does not mention the
video camera, we find the recording itself does contain and
convey an almost euphoric optimism, this palpable intention
to "engage a critical relationship with televisual society by
participating televisually. 6 " And, in this newly self-aware
moment of the information age, intervening in televisual so-
ciety was seen as truly radical: a means of "allowing people
to. ..shape and reassert control over their lives." 7
Find a way to produce a record of your act of re-speech-a
video camera, a sound recorder, a notetaker. If you don't
own a camera, borrow a friend's camera, use a display
camera in a camera store, find a surveillance camera. Use
a toy or make a model camera to re-enact the process of
recording. Repeat the process of speaking to your recording
device until the experience becomes recorded within your
own memory.
We find ourselves back in the space of the monitor, consid-
ering the recording's intention in relation to its outcome up
to and beyond today. The People's Communication Network
made a record of an event that might have only survived in
the memories of audience members.
On a fundamental level, to make a record of your speech is
to use the camera as a witness, to "broad-cast," giving your
act of speaking a life beyond any one person's memory.
What will become of the record? You might also ask how you
can participate in structures of archive, access and distribution.
10
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
Our re-speaking is a re-making and a play-back of the re-
cording, a performative method of interrogating video as a
repository for memory and a technology of forgetting.
My children, my children, I'm here today to identify myself
and rededicate myself in the spirit of Marcus Garvey and
our beloved brothers, who are incarcerated here behind
these infernal walls, to meet the struggle on the behalf of
our men who find themselves recaptured under captivity
Queen Mother Moore faces the camera. Through the record-
ing device, she faces us. What did it mean to her that the
camera was there? Where did the electronic device and its
promise of wide distribution beyond the walls of the prison
stand in terms of importance, alongside the eyes, ears, and
memories of the prisoners and community members there to
witness the speech? Nevertheless, we allow that the tape tel-
escopes out into a procession of memories: those of the pris-
oners in the courtyard, the force of Queen Mother Moore's
voice and gesture, the story of MarcusGarvey and the experi-
ence of an activated audience at the Longshoreman's Hall in
New Orleans.
How does the "record" contribute to a kind of shared re-call
- the construction and activation of collective memory? What
are the relationships of collective memory and collective ac-
tion?
Do we need the recording device in order to remember? BLW
wants to consider the potentials and the limitations of this
instrument, an efficient means of storage that has no breath.
Moore herself has also created a record of the story of Mar-
cus Garvey that she stores in and transmits through her body.
What capacities of agency and speech did Queen Mother
Moore, demonstrate if we consider her as the "recording de-
vice," the material vehicle (medium) to hold and re-tell the
memory of Marcus Garvey at the Longshoreman's hall? What
capacities are lost in the act of transferring the laborious
tasks of memorization and recitation over to video and other
recording devices? And then, what can we do about mortal-
ity? If we were to lose our technological tools-our memory
prosthetics, can we develop the capacity and commitment to
carrying each other's words forward into time?
Two years after beginning this study, BLW evaluates the
project; what have we learned? And what can someone
else discover from acts of re-speaking? We find ourselves
more sensitive to the speech acts of others, to all attempts
at oratory. We speculate that we ourselves have become
more skilled at speaking, and that there is, in the debates
and discomfort that re-speaking triggers, a key toward the
formation of a parrhesiac (outspoken and truthful) politi-
cal subjectivity. We are certain this is a great way to learn
history. And yet, our research is still inconclusive and so we
invite you wholeheartedly to add sources for re-speaking and
records of your experience into the mix.
We are surrounded by stories; what kinds of stories can we
find that should be told and retold for the way they assist
acts of transference and empowerment? And what stories
can we find that, by being told and retold, will produce col-
lective recall, a gathering memory of what we need to do,
and how we might learn to act together?
NOTES
1. A kit, referenced here as a set of articles, tools, or equip-
ment used for a particular purpose: or parts, which implies a
state of incompleteness that you, the user, the reader, can "put
together," activate, and make use of. (back)
2. In some cultures, educational canons included speaking by
rote, as a way of linking elocution with tradition. In other cul-
tures, to speak out is to leap across a chasm of learned and
lonely silence, (back)
3. Moore's words emerge from her life of being there, forging
a connection between the moment of Garvey's speech in 1920
New Orleans and this moment in an upstate New York prison
fifty-three years later, (back)
4. Following the Attica prison protests in 1971, many inmates
were transferred to Green Haven and likely comprised part of
Queen Mother Moore's audience. Reform efforts led by a coa-
lition of prisoners and academic activists at this prison are
ongoing, (back)
5. The videotape was stored at Antioch College in an alterna-
tive library maintained on the campus "as a resource for radi-
cal and progressive thinking." The maintenance of this library
for potentially marginalized records is an important part of a
larger network of commitment to outspokenness. Over three
decades passed before the tape was found and restored by
the Video Data Bank in Chicago, who now distributes it. BLW
encountered the video at Pilot-TV in Chicago in 2004, where it
was presented by Dara Greenwald, an artist and activist who is
also interested in public memory and the video record, (back)
6. Hill, Chris, "Performing Video in the First Decade, 1968-
1980," Video Data Bank, (back)
7. Korot, Beryl and Gershuny, Phyllis, Radical Software 1/1,
Table of Contents, (back)
QUEEN MOTHER MOORE
SPEAKS AT GREENHAVEN
FEDERAL PRISON-
TRANSCRIPT
(In 1973, a prisoners' group called Think Tank coordinated
efforts with the African- American community outside the
prison walls to invite civil and labor rights activist Queen
Mother Moore to speak at Greenhaven Prison Community
Day. The People's Communication Network video collective
recorded the speech. This excerpt was transcribed from a
tape which has been preserved by the Video Data Bank in
Chicago. "Queen Mother" Audley Moore (1898-1997) was an
organizer, activist, and theorist who challenged racist oppres-
sion and imperialism through a huge number of diverse cam-
paigns from workplace safety to the drive for reparations for
descendants of US slaves.)
My children, I'm here today to identify myself and rededi-
cate myself in the spirt of Marcus Garvey and our beloved
brothers who are incarceratedhere behind these infernal
walls to meet the struggle on the behalf of our men who find
themselves recaptured under captivity.
Marcus Garvey came at a time when we needed him. When
we had been taught that we were black because we were
cursed, Marcus Garvey was he one that taught us from the
very beginning black is beautiful.
It's beautiful to be black. He taught us our history.
Marcus Garvey taught us about Africa. He taught us about
the great people of Africa, the great cultures that we had in
Africa.
He taught us about the wealth of Africa, He taught us how
the white people were living off of our wealth. He taught us
about the gold mines and the diamond mines and the great
forests and the fine animals and all of the wealth that we
had, the great great resources in the land.
Marcus Garvey taught us what they had robbed from us, and
to think and to speak in terms of robbery, I want our young
brothers here, who have been incarcerated here for perhaps
in a small, in a very small way, taking back what was taken
from us.
You couldn't steal brothers you cant steal you cant steal
from a white man, all that you can do take back from him. Its
all you can do because everything that he's got- everything,
everything the white man has, everything, he stole it from
you. Everything, he stole it from you.
You are not the criminals. You are not the criminals.
I'd like to ask you, have you stolen anybody's heritage? Have
you stolen children from their mothers and sold them on the
slave block?
Have you stolen wealth from the land and have you stolen
whole countries? I wanna show you- You haven't been steal-
ing no you haven't been stealing. I wanna tell you have you
taken mothers and strung them up by their heels? And took
your knives and slit their bellies so that their unborn babies
could fall to the ground and then took your heel and then 1 - 1 - 1
crushed that baby into the ground? Brothers you are notjjj^
murderers, you've never murdered. q
True some of you have killed but you're not murderers. ^
Have you dropped bombs on people and killed whole coun-, , i
tries of people. No. Have you done that people? Na uh.uj
Some of you have tried in a small way to imitate these gang- ZD
sters, O
But you haven't. No you're not the gangsters.
03
Brothers We came here to tell you to come home to us. We
want you. We came here to invite you and to let you know,
that you are not alone and to let you know that you have o>
brothers and sisters who are waiting for you and who are in-
fighting for your return and who are preparing places to re-_^
ceive you.
fcuO
And we don't want you to feel rejected. You've been rejected o
out of the man's society. But you are not rejected out of
black society. c
CD
o
03
You see.
Some of you believe that those of us in the south and I came
from way way way south, but some of you believe that we ^
were cowards down there. \
^_
I wanna give you a little example of the story of Marcus o
Garvey. ^
I wanna tell you something that nobody else could tell you-Q
who hadn't lived long enough to be here today to experience >
this to tell you. ^
Those who were there. ^
Down in New Orleans when the police told Marcus Garvey^
he couldn't speak to us, and prevented him from coming^
to speak to us one night. We of course went in delegations °-
and everything and raised such a ruckus that they had to let -■ — •
Marcus Garvey speak to us the next night. - c
But when we went. I want you to hear me.
When we went, we went determined that nothing would stop
Marcus Garvey from speaking to us. Now how did we do
that?
How do you go determined to keep the powers that be from
preventing your leader from speaking to you. How do you
do that?
Well I'll tell you how we did it. Everyone of us including
myself went armed. We went armed. I had two guns on me.
I had. I had one in my bosom and one in my pocketbook.
Blue steel and special. Pearl handle.
Pearl handle. I'll never forget my little pearl handle gun.
You think you're bad huh. Some of you think your bad. We
went. Brothers and sisters do you think we went there with
a round of ammunition.
No we went with handbags of ammunition.
Everybody had handbags of ammunition. We used to call
them satchels thatchels of satchels. Ammunition.
ii
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
Now when the police came then they filed in our hall and
they lined up against all the sides of the benches, came to
the front, lined up the side of the rostrum, line up the other
sides, lined the back.
When Garvey came in we was on benches just like you sitting
now in the Longshoremen hall. We stood up, you know and
applauded him.
Garvey said,
"My friends, I wish to apologize to you for not speaking to
you tonight but the reason I didn't speak to you is because
the mayor of the city of New Orleans permitted himself to
be used as a stooge by the Police Department to keep me
from speaking. "
When he said that the police jumped up on the sides, on
the rostrum and said I'll run you in. When he did that,
everybody stood up on the benches. All of the Smith and
Wesson's, the Winchesters came out.
Everybody's gun came out, and this is what they said,
"Speak, Garvey speak. Speak, Garvey " with the guns in
their hands. "Speak Garvey speak. "
And Garvey said, "as I was saying."
BLW is an artist-activist collective that investigates
ways to recover the power of speech in a culture where
oral competence is displaced by media forms.
Re-enactments of archived recordings also include the
1969 interview of Fred Hampton recorded by the
Videofreex in Chicago. Moving beyond re-enactment to
the production of sites for engaged speaking and
exchange, recent projects include "Invitation to a
Hearing] a public hearing produced in collaboration
with Think Tank at the ICA in Philadelphia, "A Meeting
is a Question Between, "a week of public meetings at
Millenium Park, Chicago, and "Fragments of a Strike, "
a series of participatory readings from the 5-month
San Francisco State student walkout in 1968-9. BLW is
Rozalinda Borcila, Sarah Lewison, and Julie Wyman.
Contact: borcila(at)usf.edu
this text was first published in The Journal of
Aesthetics and Protest #5, 2007 (Los Angeles)
INTERVIEWS (3)
IN A RADIO TALKSHOW
AS OF 2099
PI I remember that the zones were distinguished
from one another somehow on symbolic levels. That
there was an incredibly complex system of representa-
tion which would designate which zone you belonged to
and lived in. You mentioned these certificates already,
with relation to what P4 hinted at- in your recollec-
tions, were there any other important manifestations
of these divisions P2 described, that you could point
us to?
P2 another indication of this complex relation-
ship between the structure and its manifestation was
money...
P3 ...which was a way to symbloise economic rela-
tions.
P2 basically each country, well, many countries had
individual currencies (which was what the system of
money was called) and those countries that were less
dominant on the world market, which maybe had less
resources, or weren't as developed as other countries,
well their currency had less value than that of more
powerful zones.
P4 this also inhibited movement, because people
with less money were less desirbable, they couldnt
offer as much to a zone if they were trying to move
there, if they didnt have a job or if they werent rich
enough, any zone would see them as a burden.
PI so this again shows a powerful link between the
concepts and their physical and concrete symbols...?
P4 yeah, but beyond a representational level, these
geographical zones also differed because they were
somewhat closed systems- within which a certain law,
currency, language was contained- so this meant that
each such zone would consider themselves different
from any other zone, and maintain this difference not
only via symbolic means, but also by trying to become
"richer" than other countries.
PI "rich" was when a zone or person or group had a
lot of assets, things that other people could want or
need- then they could exchange these goods or con-
cepts with symbolic units (money).
P4 that economy didn' t just work on an individual
level, it also worked globally...
P5 if people from poorer economies (with less finan-
cial capital) wanted to move to richer countries, this
was often not allowed
P3 because they were seen as having nothing to of-
fer?
P5 if they couldnt contribute enough they were seen
to drain rewsources. these people lived precariously,
and often ended up doing work that other people didnt
want to do.
PI i've been going through the archive and came
across a lot of representations of every day life which
seem to stem from what used to be called the "west",
i think, i found that a lot of these images- film as well
as print images- showed the more stable zones as a
kind of center of the world and life. In these images,
life in the center appears incredibly plentiful and
happy and beautiful somehow...
P4 yeah, these were the images that were distributed
around the globe, showing how great it was to be in
these zones, to live there.
P2 i was living that time in europe, which was a kind
of alliance of economically well to do zones, and each
day i was confrotned with these images, showing me
what my life should look like... this created an incred-
ible feeling of lack, like: if your life did not resemble
these images, you felt out of place, but not everyone
lived happily, not even, or particularly not, in the
wealthy zones, i remember there were huge disparities
within privileged areas, in terms of peoples standard
of living and health and all. even a single street could
have houses that resembled those from so-called "hol-
lywood movies" alongside what was called "council
housing", still, generally there was a certain way of
representing this life in what used to be called the
"west" in a pretty favourable way. in contrast to the
glorifying representations, the majority of images of
the poorer nations or zones were showing war and de-
struction, and abject misery, saying that people were
longing for a better life there, that might have been
ture but the reasons for that lack of good life were
never addressed- like colonialism and the way it was
kept on going even in the 21st century.
P2 at the same time, you felt that you had so much
compared to the people living in disfavoured countries,
that you felt guilty for wanting change, for wanting to
exit that supposed happiness, it was quite difficult
to find a way out of that way of thinking, as far as i
remember.
PI it took a while to learn to reason with that, yes...
P5 you had the impression that people were longing
for a better life?
PI i'd say people were quite alienated from them-
selves and from each other, they were longing to stop
that, but it was hard to figure out how, especially when
confronted with these images which glorified the kind
of life you could have lived.
Al it sounds like people had an odd relationship to
their desires, and so also to each other... i don't get it
entirely, was it some kind of... premature alienation...
perhaps? not in the contemporary sense of alienation,
not like xenosophy, but like a slightly perverse ver-
sion of that? or how would you relate this alienation to
xenosophy?
P2 well yes it was a less sophisticated form of al-
ienation, almost as comon as it is today, yet nothing to
do with the way we live our otherness now. aliens used
to scare people.
[-] I I
www.futurearchive.org - conversation for radio/ 1
TAKING YOUR ISSUE
WITH UTOPIA (LONDON,
NOVEMBER 2206)
PI ..i miss it
P2 oh, you miss it..
PI ..i must say i miss it, feeling very ambivalent
about..
P3 toda..
PI today, yeah
P2 socie..
PI i'm feeling very ambivalent about it, although
there's very serious issues with the 21st century, i
don't mourn, but i still feel it was an interesting place
to live, interesting time to grow up..
P2 well, even back then i was already frustrated with
the tameness of society, and i do feel that contem-
porary society is amazingly tame- when you do have
everything provided and you do feel that everything is
nice, well, sometimes you just have to burn it down.
12
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
PI yes, not enough destruction.
P2 playing with destruction and playing with..
PI ...when you could still have amateurism, i miss
amateurism
P2 simple experimentation without having to..
PI ...or when you had to do a shit job then doing
something for fun was like a real release, and now...
doing strange things with electricity, you can do it
every day if you want! and it's still interesting, but
yeah..
P2 the drive to escape and., boredom and frustra-
tion was such a powerful motivator, and struggle did
empower those people who could rise above it. the fact
that most people could do nothing but struggle was
a problem back then, but now perhaps we don't have
enough struggle, so without struggle we don't have the
need to go forward, and how much is our society now
stagnated? we don't feel we have to fight for food, we
don't have to stuggle everyday...
PI i know, yeah, our children... they never had to
worry where the next meal is coming from, they never
had to..
P2 everything's nutritous, we've got rid of bullying,
we've got rid of antisocial behaviour, we're all nice and
good- but...
PI it wasn't so easy in our days
P2 it wasn't so easy in our days.
[...]
P2 it is just... you know, you do have to miss the fact
that we hadn't solved so many problems.
PI yes and str... not struggle, but theres always
something interesting going on when things are fucked
up. being fucked up essentially drives... not progress,
because that's again a very 21st century term, but it
drives., it dirves imagination, when the needs are ex-
treme, then the ingenuity and the intensity of peoples
communication, of working together is much more
interesting, and you can't really create that artificially,
and the historical events, you know, the needs that
are driven by cataclysms of various sorts are always
intense and interesting and complex and i don't think
that there is any way of recreating those artificially.
[...]
P3 i found this intriguing term a lot in the archives,
"intellectual property", and though property in itself
is a concept i didn't grow up with, having been born
in the 22nd century, i read up on that and can still get
the idea, i think, but "intellectual property"?
P2 nobody knew what it was back then, except some
people felt they could profit from it-
Pi i think it's- i can't remember what it was, it
was... it never quite made sense at the time and i still
don't quite understand what it was. i think it... pete,
can you explain this?
P2 some people got to claim ownership of "ideas",
and therefore those ideas were owned by them, and
owned by them in a way which claimed no one else
could use them...
PI yeah, it was a very peculiar thing, it was a very
very... i mean... people claiming ownership of non-
diminishable resources, which doesnt have any rela-
tionship to the cost of exchange- you could reproduce
an idea as many times as you want and you wouldn't
really lose anything from it, in fact, you have most to
gain from it, but-
Pi? -back then we didnt know that.
PI i mean that was really the e... i mean that was
really the beginning of the e... when that system dis-
integrated in the early 21st century, that was when it
became obvious that all the other systems of resource
distribution were also going to be coming apart, be-
cause once it was clear that that really didnt make any
sense economically, when you looked at the problems
you were trying to solve with economic systems, pro-
tecting ideas from exploitation by anybody who wanted
them just didnt make any sense...
[...]
www.futurearchive.org -saul and peter
NEGOTIATING SPEECH
AND ORGANIZATIONAL
PRACTICES:
FIELD NOTES AND
REFLECTIONS FROM TWO
C0UNTER-G8 (2007)
INITIATIVES .
Anja Kanngieser/Manuela Zechner
June 2007
Over a three week period during the end of May into mid
June 2007, a variety of political and cultural events took
place in anticipation of, and response to, the G8 meeting
in Heiligendamm, Germany. These included alternative
summits, workshops, conferences, plenums, art exhibitions,
concerts, and of course demonstrations and protests.
Two of these events, the summit: non-aligned
initiatives in education culture and the Block G8 blockade
action have, despite their radical differences, struck us as
particularly compelling as they confronted correlations
between speech and praxis in regards to self-organization
and accessibility, and the discourses surrounding these.
Throughout and after the two events we considered
questions around recent conceptualizations of alternative
(non-state affiliated and neoliberal-critical) organizational
models and how these could be practically realized. For
instance, how can other worlds be possible, and what would
these require in terms of shifts in organizational strategies
and alignments? How can ideas of horizontality and direct
democracy function when put into practice in different
milieus? What kinds of symbolic capital come into play in
different milieus? What role does visibility play with respect
to such events and how do they try to circumnavigate the
problems emerging from a need to be visible? And how can
we conceive of methodologies for organization that avoid
replication of relationships of dominance, specialization,
and exclusion?
What we were specifically interested in was how we
could trace and address the lines of coincidence and
rupture occurring between what was said and what was
practiced. We chose to investigate concepts that have
gained momentum in recent years, yet are idiomatic in
the rhetoric of different organizational practices including
neo-liberal economic and social policy as well as critical
activist movements: such as transparency, accessibility,
collaboration, flexibility, and heterogeneity. We wanted
to investigate how discourses around those terms are
embedded in the organizational practices of particular G8
counter movements that we participated in.
This text presents a few of our reflections arising from these
two specific initiatives, which we both participated in to
varying degrees. For this reason we are only able to speak
about what we experienced during the events and their
immediate aftermath; what we saw, felt, and heard, and
what evolved through processes of conversation with others
that were present. In addition to these experiences locate
our analysis in official documentations; calls to action,
websites, flyers, brochures and media coverage to further
locate our analysis. The research we conducted is therefore
embedded in contexts that are necessarily highly situational
and relational, and consequentially partial and fragmented.
Much of this investigation was informed by dialogues and
queries, by attempting to negotiate through and around
tensions between theory and praxis, or rhetoric and action.
While we would certainly not argue that theory or rhetoric
in itself does not have the potential to create or intervene
13
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
in events, our primary concern here was the practical
realizations of organizational ideas designed to provide
alternatives to dominant hierarchical and representative
democratic structures. This focus on the very material
aspects of the events and how they developed means that
much of this text is informed by observant participation,
which is in part manifest by an unfortunate (and perhaps
superfluous) relegation of theory to a supplementary
position. However, our intention with this text was simply to
contemplate some of the structural mechanisms of these
two organizing bodies, and to offer our initial responses
not as conclusions but as impetus for ongoing exchanges
on how we could realize alternatives to the exploitation and
domination characterized by the velocity and ubiquity of
global capitalism.
A contextualization: the new
organization ot dissent
The question has always been organizational, not at all
ideological: is an organization possible which is not modeled
on the apparatus of the State, even to prefigure the State to
come? (1)
Both the summit and the Block G8 emerged explicitly from
within socio-political and cultural networks concerned
with addressing inequalities associated with neoliberal
capitalist conditions. In concurrence to this, a concern of
such networks has been the reevaluation and reinvention of
political resistance, in order to shift away from ideological
and organizational structures that replicate hierarchies
culminating in dominance and exclusion.
These new organizational models adopted by resistance
movements (particularly those critical of global capitalism
and economic rationalism) have increasingly developed
over the past decade or so. Aspects of these have been
visible, for example, since the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas
in 1994, and spectacularly during and post the anti-WTO
protests in Seattle in late 1999. This has been in part
influenced by the acceleration of globalization, which has
prompted new technologies and socio-political and cultural
mechanisms through which activism has been integrally
transformed. The Seattle protests inspired and shaped
much of the protest actions in the succeeding years, such
as counter-G8 activities and protests, specifically through
its use of the Internet achieved a gathering of unexpected
scale. (2)
What denoted those events such as Seattle as indicating a
paradigm shift in the articulation of protest was what was
later conceptualized as the "movement of movements":
the temporary convergences of multivalent disparate
international individuals, groups and organizations to
voice dissent against corporate driven globalization and
exploitative models of free trade. This movement not only
consists of protest but also incorporates counter-summits,
World Social Forums, all kinds of networks, initiatives,
activities and structures.
What became clear in the Seattle event was the emergence
of new networks and webs of resistance, which were
comprised of linked constellations of participants and
priorities united in response to the global inequalities
created through neo-liberal trade policies and economic
rationalism. These networks were predominantly established
by independent factions in attendance, detaching
themselves from the constraints of traditional representative
parties and institutions. Critical of the operations of power
in such structures, these networks manifest alternatively to
the archetypal hierarchical organization or party models. As
David Graeber notes, it is no longer about seizing the power
dynamics of the state, but more about "delegitimizing and
dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger
spaces of autonomy from it." (3)
Unlike forms of decision making and representation
reminiscent of sovereign governance, networks (as was
clear in Seattle) do not have a leader; command and control
mechanisms are fluid and decentralized, and are nebulous
and open enough to be able to accommodate diverse
interests and agendas within an aggregate focused on a
singular target. The concentration on ideological affiliation
and conflict is replaced with an intention to create different
methodologies and forms for organization, participation (as
opposed to delegation), consensus (as opposed to majority)
and exchange. In this process, a proliferation of hybrid
organizational instruments and techniques are constantly
being tested and debated.
For Michael Hardt it is precisely this network format, and
the arenas opened up by these experimental organizations,
that allowed different groups with different agendas to come
into contact with one another in a productive way during the
Seattle protests. Hardt argues that such networks replace
oppositionality with multiple positions; the dialectic is
superseded by triangulations of third, fourth and indefinite
points of connexion. As he states,
777/s is one of the characteristics of the Seattle events...
groups which we thought in objective contradiction to
one another - environmentalists and trade unions, church
groups and anarchists - were suddenly able to work
together, in the context of the
network of the multitude. (4)
Although Hardt's account here may be interpreted as
somewhat generous, the adoption of the network format
does actively move to transfigure the ways that activist
groups and agencies relate to one another, to greater or
lesser success. What is attempted through the spaces
opened up by these explorations and re-imaginings of
constituent powers is a re-invention of notions and practices
of consensual and direct democracy.
So how was this recent history and context of the global
resistance networks manifest in Germany? (5) The two case
studies we are examining represent constituents of these
international alliances. Both proclaimed to be invested in
realizing non-hierarchical organizational processes, which
involved the deliberate concatenation of heterogeneous
participants, new forms of action, transparent processes
and open accessibility.
The Block G8 blockade was instigated during the final days
of the weeklong counter G8 program in and around Rostock
and Heiligendamm. The larger program consisted of
numerous demonstrations attracting crowds of protesters
(around 80.000 for the International Demo on Saturday
June 2nd; around 15-20.000 at the migration demo June
4th), workshops, an art space, concerts and an alternative
summit as well as opportunities for more informal meetings
(6). Three camps were constructed for the campaign at
which action trainings, info sessions, plenums and social
events were also held. The blockade began on the official
inauguration of the G8 summit for 2007, on Wednesday 6th
June. It was conceived to span the duration of the meeting,
which it succeeded in doing. The blockade itself consisted
of thousands of people sitting and standing, sleeping,
dancing and generally socializing on main transport avenues
to the meeting place. The event itself seemed to be met with
great pleasure by those taking part and it was often relayed
that the blockade had the atmosphere of a festival, which
was strengthened with sound systems in some parts and
a sense of solidarity and caring throughout. The blockade
occurred in unison with autonomous blockades, however for
many, due to the magnitude of the participants, it became
an iconic event. By the end of the series of interventions, it
became progressively difficult to distinguish the boundaries
of Block G8 from many of the other blockading actions.
The summit around "non-aligned initiatives in education
culture" was an event held in Berlin prior to the G8, and
may be seen as an attempt to organize a meeting in a
context similar to the World Social Forum. This format was
not based upon protest but resembled more of a congress
or conference. It drew upon specific ideas, histories and
discourses (e.g. non-alignment, summit, self-organization,
un-learning, etc) which involved much academic reference
and language. The three days of summit were comprised
of 60 parallel events that included presentations, caucuses,
and workshops. It was re/presented by a language that
structured these as radical fora for exchange, debate
and action. This was to become possible via access to
large amounts of space and a gathering of around 200
people from divergent backgrounds and approaches (art,
academia and pedagogy, activism, union organizing,
hacking, journalism, sex work, etc), the generous offer of
spaces for those to meet as well as the availability of some
travel grants. Through the presence and placement of
various established academic personalities and a somewhat
centralized way of programming, a dominance of certain
discourses and practices emerged that seemed to exclude
a range of more activist and grass roots approaches and
viewpoints.
What relates these two events in our minds, aside from the
organizational intentions, was how certain characteristics
of centralization and governance managed to permeate the
actualizations of what were, at least discursively, promising
speculations for practical mobilization and action. While
rhetorically almost faultless, some of the manifestations of
these sentiments left space for more to be desired.
While both events were often pleasurable and
provided ample opportunity for dialogue, learning and
creativity, we find it important to analyze some of the
tensions and contradictions that erupted in order to locate
the quite considerable potentials of such endeavors. For,
when judged under value parameters of success or failure,
these initiatives become less interesting than when their
internal mechanisms become exposed for reflection and
further experimentation.
Block G8
Before and during the counter G8 mobilizations, which took
place over a week in Rostock and Heiligendamm, extensive
coalitions of affinity groups and movements were formed
to collectively organize and assemble blockades designed
not only to disable the traffic of delegates, workers, goods
and services to and from the meeting, but also to make
the breadth and density of the resistance against the G8
and its mechanisms internationally visible. Comprising one
segment of the larger weeklong constellation of counter
G8 demonstrations, workshops and actions taking place
in and around Rostock and Heiligendamm, the blockade
was interesting to us due to its potential longevity and
consequences as a protest action. Additionally, more than
any other of the actions it was a direct gesture of mass civil
disobedience, designed to sustainably reiterate dissent and
resistance through the many diverse and not necessarily
associated networks and individuals intending to remain in
cooperation and solidarity until the objective of blockading
as many roads for as long as possible had been attained.
The predominant call for blockading came from an
alliance of over 128 groups including radical left, church,
environmental and anti-nuclear, trade unions, youth political
parties, non-violent action groups and anti-fascist and
anti-racist groups conceived under the slogan of "Block
G8. Move. Block. Stay" (7). Whether this was intended to
function as the principal blockade of the event is unclear,
however what was clear was that due to the sheer quantity
of different groups involved in, or supportive of, the
organizing process and enaction, and the aim to blockade
to function through corporeal mass over any other means,
the high number of activists taking part (over 10, 000
covering two major roads leading to the summit, with other
autonomous groups blocking two other thoroughfares)
ensured both mainstream and alternative media attention.
In order to generate as much participation as possible, a
number of calls for the blockading action were circulated by
some of the organizing groups, including an umbrella Block
G8 call, as well as from FelS (Fur eine linke Stromung/ for
a left wing current), the Interventionist Left, and various
Antifascist factions. Common to all was a particular
14
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
evocative rhetoric of global solidarity, heterogeneity and
liberation from ideologies of domination and discrimination
associated with capitalist and state machinations.
Assurances were made to radical and open modes of
organization that not only acted to "delegitimate capital's
domination, neoliberalism, and therefore the G8" but also,
"ultimately implies at the same time to reinvent the left and
the social movements" (8). It was also argued that the
event would arise from new conceptualizations, as outlined
in the Block G8 FAQ,
Block G8 is a completely new concept woven together from
our manifold experiences, incorporating the advantages of
many strategies of various political traditions. (9)
In order to look at how a relationship between a
delegitimation of neoliberal capitalism and radically
new strategic organizational models could be discerned,
it seemed necessary for us to examine the rhetoric
surrounding "horizontal" and consensual, post
representative methods of social and political organization
in regards to the Block G8 campaign, and directly address
issues of flexibility, accessibility and transparency that were
made visible.
Organizing Block G8
In their call to action, the Interventionist Left made
reference to a broader context of political activism that we
have introduced as inferred by the term, which,
...since Seattle, has been called the "movement of
movements". "We" refers to a global constellation of
emancipatory politics that extends beyond the left, as well
as the older and newer social movements. (10)
Typical of the concept of the "movement of movements"
and the resistance against global capitalism are certain
strategies for cooperative organization and action. In
analyzing the construction for the Block G8 event, we
found it important to do so in the context of what is
inferred by the "movement of movements" and how such
a discourse operates as indicating alternative models of
decision-making processes. As outlined in the introduction,
associated with the "movement of movements" is a mode
of political organization that espouses horizontality, self-
organization, networks, consensus, direct democracy, and
multiplicity, over hierarchical or sovereign models, and
representational politics.
Unlike previous modes of organization in which
ideology or the party was central, this form of organization
relies heavily on transitory convergences of manifold micro
networks, individuals and affinity groups coming from
different spaces of the "left" spectrum, from conservative to
autonomist, under a common goal or intention. In the case
of the organization for the Block G8, this was reflected in
the diversity of the groups in support of, and involved in, the
development of the campaign.
Aligning itself with this conception of the
movements of movements, the praxis of the G8 organizing
bodies made attempts at overcoming some of the problems
associated with previous "vertical" organizational processes.
However, despite the rhetoric of flexibility, heterogeneity,
horizontality, and non-representationality, it became
clear to us that some material tensions and limitations
nonetheless actualized and required further extrapolation
and exploration.
"This is what democracy looks like?"
One of the catch cries heard resounding throughout many
counter summit demonstrations in recent history has been
"this is what democracy looks like!" One of the explicit calls
by FelS was for "equal rights for everyone" (11). In thinking
about this organization of dissent, it seemed to us to be
urgent to investigate what some of the practical realizations
of such sentiments might mean for the internal structural
mechanisms and strategic processes of the Block G8 action
specifically, and more generally in the context of a mass
mobilization necessarily made up of singular and collective
national and international players presenting polyvalent
interests, desires and agendas.
Like many of the recent mobilizations against state
institutions and political summits, a preoccupation with
global networking and solidarity meant that a significant
number of international actors participated in the counter
G8 interventions. According to reflections from a debriefing
session held in London in late June 2007, this was
estimated to be around 30 percent. This percentage was
comprised largely of European activists but also included
activists from the Asia Pacific region, Africa, North America,
South America and Canada.
The presence of international actors in the
later stages of the decision-making procedures with
no tangible prior involvement exposed an element of
disjunction. The fact that the organizational process had
begun far in advance of the counter G8 events meant that
as international participants with no access to previous
meetings, our first instance of contact with the action
committee occurred either shortly before leaving for the
protest or a few days later during discussions held at the
camps (specifically Reddelich).
These plenums were held frequently on the days directly
preceding the action, at an even accelerated rate on the day
before the event and primarily consisted of interlocutors or
spokespeople from each affinity group coming together to
apparently consolidate logistical aspects of the action and
to act as information carriers between the macro and micro
networks and collectives.
Flexibility
After conversing with a number of people involved in the
meetings as members of affinity groups, participants of the
actions, and through different debriefing forums, certain
apprehensions were brought to light, surrounding issues of
flexibility, heterogeneity and transparency.
Because of the specific geographical location of
the organizing committee (based in Germany), many of the
international actors were absent for the long term planning
of the blockade. When it became possible to engage in
discussion, the procedural operations and forums in which
they occurred appeared to be fundamentally striated.
Amongst a number of the people we spoke to, there was a
general feeling that this inability to be active in the process
led to an alienation and exclusion from the decisions that
were made. It was frequently commented that it seemed
as if the strategies had been rigorously predetermined and
sedimented so that any attempt to offer suggestions or
alternatives was, while met with hospitality and generosity,
nonetheless basically impotent to effect changes. This in
itself was not surprising, or even particularly unreasonable.
Clearly it was necessary to develop structures and
establish certain protocols in order to mobilize a sustainable
and functioning mass blockade. What was difficult however
was that despite the rhetoric of flexibility and horizontality,
as international participants there was an impression that
as a central organizing committee had been previously
established, it was almost impossible to gain access to or
intervene in the action process.
Block G8 did not at any time allude that this would not
be as such, and were in fact were openly supportive of
actions occurring autonomously to their central blockade.
Nor did they advocate themselves as the paramount
action. Through all the disparate media they presented
themselves as but one option for intervention. Despite this
there was the impression that the blockade was to take
centre stage, at least quantitively, and all other actions were
destined to remain peripheral and diffuse. This may have, in
conjunction with a range of other factors, consequentially
become the case due to their sheer presence and visibility
in comparison to other initiatives which was partially due
to their necessarily high levels of organization and public
recognisability (which extended to include a website,
newspaper and other material publications, action training
days, regular meetings, t-shirts, jingles, banners, badges
etc).
Heterogeneity
In one debriefing issued in late June 2007 by some
autonomists in Berlin, an acknowledgement was made that
due to problems plaguing their own organizational and
collective processes and to poor information infrastructures,
a number of activists had ended up supporting and
participating in the main blockade rather than constructing
autonomous actions (12). It is also not unviable for us to
imagine that other individuals, or affinity groups, unaffiliated
or unfamiliar with the constellation of established social and
political movements, were also spontaneously drawn to the
Block G8 initiative, not only in solidarity but perhaps also
due to confusion, lack of information, or experience.
The intention of the Block G8 to be inclusive of
all people wanting to participate in the blockading action
meant that it was perceived to be a safer option for activists
either less experienced in blockading or not desiring to
partake in more aggressive direct action, which constituted
almost the majority of attendees. Unfortunately this
gesture was tinged with the slightly paternalistic tenor of
the organizing process, which ultimately transferred the
responsibility of logistics from the participating individuals
to the action organizers. Throughout the calls the diversity
of the blockade was explicitly asserted. As was written in
both the Block G8 FAQ and the call to action
The Block G8 alliance is composed of people and groups
with very different backgrounds experiences. ..thousands
of people from different political, social and cultural
backgrounds can take part. (13)
While the legitimacy of encouraging people from all
different orientations and positions to participate in unison
is not being critiqued here, what became apparent to us
in the execution of the blockade over the two days was the
assumption of a homogenization of interest and criteria for
action on the part of the organizing committee. This was
particularly dangerous, as due to unrelated and potentially
unforeseen situations, the Block G8 mobilization became at
some stages the most viable and influential option for action
for many activists. This was signified by its population in
quantitative comparison to other autonomous actions and
blockades.
In one London debriefing the comment was made
that there might have been a sentiment present of "they
[Block G8] would block people who broke their guidelines
before blocking the roads?" (14) This expressedly highlights
one of the downfalls of the high visibility (and hence
allure), and the rigidity of organization that marked the
blockade. Whilst espousing a discourse of diversity and
multiplicity, it seemed that some participants felt as though
once committed to supporting the blockade, a number
of constraints or restrictions were immediately imposed,
negating any larger sense of heterogeneity, choice or space
for contradiction. What became apparent was an increasing
impression of closure and finitude leaving some feeling
frustrated with an inability to be differently (perhaps more
actively) involved. This was exemplified during the blockade
through the spontaneous caucuses held to decide further
courses for action (which even at some points began to
include core Block G8 groups), and in the flow of individuals
and affinity groups between the main blockades and other
locations, lending solidarity to smaller and more precarious
barricades and campaigns.
Transparency
The tendency toward inadvertent homogeneity and
the reactions surrounding closures in dialogues and
dissatisfaction to some extent intersects with what we might
consider as contradictions of transparency that were also
present. As the Block G8 FAQ stated,
It is important for us to create a situation which will be
transparent for everybody. (15)
For the Block G8 action, transparency was presented as
a strategic means by which to not only mobilize more
members of the public to support, and engage in, the mass
15
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
blockade, but also as an attempt to gain visibility as a tactic
for de-escalation of state repression. What becomes clear
in analyzing both the texts and praxis of the Block G8 is
that the notion of transparency is very nearly conflated with
visibility and magnitude.
Whereas media and information on very customary
elements of the action were made available publicly, and
while it was possible to partake in action training, buy a
t-shirt, make a banner, download the jingle, or print out and
distribute flyers, it was difficult to meaningfully participate
in the organizing process remotely (despite the clear online
presence of the campaign), and it was almost impossible to
find logistical data: proceedings from meetings, information
on quality and quantity of input from supportive and/ or
participating groups, financial sources, and methodologies
of decision making.
The practical motivation for designating decisive facets
of the process vague for protection against accusations
of illegality and avoidance of state repression is not to be
overlooked here. In Berlin and Hamburg, many activists
were observed and controlled by police for months before
the event, which culminated in a series of raids and
confiscations of equipment and materials.
However, the ambiguity (and even omission of)
infrastructural constituents such as these also meant that
some felt that integral information remained obfuscated.
This extended to a more pervasive dissatisfaction when
crucial information relevant to the action was not disclosed
to all participants until the very last minute. Sharp
criticism arose from some activists on discovering that the
organizers had notified the police of the termination of the
blockade but had not made either the termination point,
or the negotiation with the police, public to all participants
themselves first. For many, this culminated in a feeling of
being non-consensually represented, and in some cases, of
resentment and futility.
The risk with making a claim to this sort of transparency
is that it becomes easy to assume that an abundance of
information signifies comprehensive disclosure. When
organizing a situation like the blockades at a summit protest
such as a counter G8 it can be tempting to speak of, and
for the multitude, to speak of singularities moving together
to create something new, but to reduce the thousands of
individuals into a faceless mass who can be assumed to
have the choice to participate, unthinkingly surpassing
the reality of individual desires, experiences, knowledge's,
suggestibility and insecurities and how these can effect that
choice.
This unintentional overlooking of such factor's,
along with other crypto-representational maneuvers was
present in another event prior to the Block G8 campaign,
the "summit in non-aligned initiatives in education culture"
(hereafter summit), and it is to this that we now turn.
Summit: non-aligned
initiatives in education culture
(16)
Summit was a three day event (24 - 28th May 2007)
conceptualized by a group of six people involved in art,
theory, and to some extent activism (Florian Schneider,
Irit Rogoff, Kodwo Eshun, Nicolas Siepen, Nora Sternfeld,
Susanne Lang). The promotional materials that were
released in relation to the summit (texts and calls for
participation, websites, posters in Berlin, printed program,
flyers as well as interviews and calls on mailing lists and
in journals) were written with attention to contemporary
cultural, arts, activist and political arguments. The summit
appeared foremost as a project that was inspired by
theoretical propositions, discursive interplay and activist
practices. It aimed to offer a framework for the relation
of rigorous theoretical projects to initiatives in education,
activism and art.
In what follows, we will isolate some of the notions and
phrases that were used in curating the event, and reflect
upon the forms of action and organization they insinuate
and how they came to shape the event itself. One of the
main problems we aim to address with this paper is the
relation and correspondence between discursive and
organizational modes of setting up events or projects. How
can the proposal of a discourse determine the facilitation
of a project, and vice versa? Attempts to generate new
concepts and forms of action took place at the intersection
of various discourses. This raised questions about the
positionality of those involved, the propagation of certain
concepts and not others, and the distribution of power
throughout the event. Our interest here lies primarily in
looking at the vocabulary and theoretical framework the
summit engaged and the way these assertions and ideas
played out in terms of the practices of organization, hosting,
collaboration, inauguration and sharing within the event.
Collaboration
The use of the notion of collaboration in the context of
the summit- much like with other concepts- was shaped by
the prior investigations of its organizers, such as a text by
Florian Schneider (17) and an interview with him and Irit
Rogoff, in which he states,
SUMMIT is definitely [sic] a collaborative environment which
can be used in order to generate some more fragments
of a contemporary theory of collaboration. The theme
of collaboration intersects with questions of "interest",
"hospitality", "seriousness", "curiosity" etc. on which we are
planning a series of specific workshops. (18)
From this we surmised that the organizing committees
idea of collaboration is based upon a shared acceptance of
different ideological positions and intentions, participation
and negotiation, as is stated in several summit texts as well
as the text by Florian Schneider.(19)
The intention seems to be not to define
collaboration as such but to keep elaborating on it, to see
what kinds of contracts, expectations, and histories make
for what kinds of collaborations. The means of finding
this out would itself be collaborative. How does one set up
an open collaborative project whereby not only all those
involved self-authorize to collaborate, but also actively
invest in and decide upon the course of the project? If
we see collaboration as a transversal, open, consensus-
based and transparent practice that is critical of its own
organization and dynamics and dependent on constant
feedback between its participants, we might examine this in
relation to the organization of summit. What would it mean
to open spaces for collaboration within a three- day formal
and informal meeting before the G8? On one level it would
mean making spaces that are accessible and self-organized,
self- reflexive, self- regulating as well as connected to
current political events, debates and activist strategies. The
notions structuring the event would have to be proposed as
open guidelines. The summit set out to facilitate this via an
open internet platform that was accessible some months
prior to the event, where the shaping of both discourse and
event could be witnessed and interfered with. An events
program that partially auto- curated through an open call
for proposals of activities was accessible online, and the
suggestion of specific formats such as caucus, workshop,
conversation and working group as much as the involvement
of persons and initiatives associated with activism as well
as academia, education, and art (see the summit program)
seemed to reflect ideas of collaboration. Still that was not
the end of it: if collaboration were a common framework or
moment but not a shared strategic or ideological position,
how would the summit constitute such a space?
The question is: How can we find new ways of analyzing,
recognizing, decision making and working together without
a common ground from which to operate? (20)
It takes common ground to bring people together for a
"summit on non- aligned initiatives in education culture",
and while the motivations and backgrounds of participants
may have been diverse, the majority of participants came
from the worlds of academia, art, critical theory, and to
some extent activism (people involved in all kinds of radical
practices). We would locate one of the biggest problems
of summit in the fact that the most common link between
participants was Goldsmiths College London (specifically
the Visual Cultures department), with which a large part of
the contributors and attendants were affiliated (three people
from the facilitating committee came from Visual Cultures
department). This came to appear to us as problematic
insofar as the idea of non- alignment (which will be further
examined) insinuated that this would either have to be
avoided or directly addressed.
The last night at the summit (Sunday 28th May) witnessed
the eruption of a debate around the representation
of smaller as well as local initiatives, a felt imbalance
between established theoretical positions and less visible
activist projects or praxes as well as a questioning of the
summit's engagement with the imminent G8 meetings
in Heiligendamm and initiatives and actions that were
concurrently happening in Berlin and elsewhere. During this
spontaneous discussion, intense exchange and reflection
on the event itself came about, whereby a wide range of
participants and delegates became vocal and confronted
each other as well as the organizers. Much of our critique
draws on the comments and suggestions of those who had
felt at odds with the setup of summit, as most visible during
the final debate.
The ways in which the hopes for an open space were
disappointed were to our minds largely linked to the
dominance of certain discursive modes within the main
theatre hall at the HAUL The hall somewhat functioned as
the representative site of what the summit was programmed
to be. It was the only space with a centrally curated
program, while the other self-curating events (one could
register these up to the last minute) could be proposed
on an open and on-going basis and were programmed
into various spaces around the main hall (according to
requirements for technical equipment which was well
installed in cafe, workshop spaces, and foyers) as well
as in two art-affiliated spaces nearby in Berlin (Bootlab,
UnitedNationsPlaza).
The program curated by the organizing committee
featured a list of prominent names, no doubt of benefit
to the attendance and visibility of summit, however the
associated events often did not leave space for feedback
and hence did not end with lively discussion. It felt like the
various smaller self-organized workshops and presentations
in other spaces were somewhat disconnected from the more
prominent and canonical knowledge's rehearsed in the main
hall. As a central space it attracted the largest amount of
visitors while allowing for migration from one event to the
other, leaving people the possibility to listen and join into
talks in either venue- at the HAU1, there were mostly three
events taking place concurrently, and the main hall could be
entered and exited through six doors. Interestingly, despite
feeling frustrated by the course of presentations there, many
people still found themselves drawn to the main hall. This
is not to say that there were not many fruitful conversations
and meetings both within and outside the main hall, but
the problem appeared to lie with communication between
a high profile program and small events and workshops.
Rather than in close exchange with the curated program, the
smaller events appeared to somewhat orbited the brilliant
discourses thereof.
Particularly for those involved in activist practices,
there was a sense of disconnectedness from the immediate
local and political contexts (Berlin and the G8), where there
were thousands of activists protesting, preparing for actions
and running events. On day two of summit there was a large
demonstration march against the privatization of education
happening concurrently which failed to be referenced at the
HAU and other venues. It was due to the apparent virtuosity
of the main hall presentations that a significant part of
the participants felt the main representative space was
closed to intervention or other kinds of reference. Insofar
as discussing summit as a host of collaborative processes,
one might attest that the space for debate and questioning
that would prioritize a reciprocal learning over a univocal
learning only partly emerged. Achieving this further might
have meant exiting the conventions and spaces of theory
16
P LAY BAC K , P
LAY FORWA R D
and art in order to share more diverse references and
experiences. As often happens with ambitious events,
visibility came into conflict with accessibility at summit.
Self- inauguration
How would the different participants and public respond to
the proposals at hand, taking into account their differing
backgrounds as writers, artists, activists, theorists, union
organizers, students, teachers, etc? What does it take to
self-inaugurate in a space such as the main hall at HAU1?
Irit Rogoff made a poignant comment at summit about the
kinds of capital required for accessing and participating
in such spaces- the access to discourses and vocabularies
(i.e. education) as well as the time (i.e. money) needed
to participate in an event such as summit. It seems,
particularly in the context of learning, a highly relevant and
challenging project to open out a space for thinking about,
debating and sharing our experience and engagement
with the concepts of education, learning and knowledge. A
central aspect of this must be opening up these fields and
the connected sites as much as possible to persons not in
possession of the preferred kinds of capital. The attempt
to move learning and education away from the infusion of
an individual with cognitive capital that counts on global
knowledge markets (such as liberal arts education that
caters to the Creative Industries) seems at the heart of
summit and was debated quite a bit within and in relation
to it. It appeared very hard to move beyond the set of
canonical knowledge's that were proposed at the center of
the event. While aiming to be open, flexible and accessible,
discussions at the main hall required a fairly solid
knowledge of the specific discourses at hand, as debates
in this space were very theoretical. While theory must not
necessarily inhibit, the way it is set up appears an urgent
problem to address.
In terms of the conditions for responding to any proposal
and self- inaugurating in this context, transparency seems
key, which in the case of summit was attempted but still
complicated by the abstract ways in which the event was
outlined and formulated- it was not always evident how
summit was meant to function in concrete terms. Non-
alignment, Self- organization, Self- authorization, Self-
valorization, Self- inauguration, Collaboration, un-learning,
un-organizing, urgent thought, making theory urgent,
history lessons, etc were some of the terms structuring
the debates and underlying curatorial decisions, and as
proposals attracted much curiosity and interest. People
came from many different parts of the world, with different
expectations and investments. It appeared that at the event
many felt unsure about inscribing themselves in certain
spaces as contributors or vocal presences, because it was
not clear what translation could legitimately be attempted
between these "open" concepts and various discussion
formats. While different investments and expectations
seem to us desirable, transparency remains a key point
when organizing an event that invites for participation,
contribution and collaboration. The summit website offered
a kind of FAQ section, answering five main questions in
relation to the proposed vocabulary and call for summit:
"Non-alignment" (21)
The main question we found ourselves facing with respect
to non-alignment was to what extent the practice of non-
alignment, as used to describe the initiatives present
at summit, would have to be rigorously applied to the
organization of the event summit in itself. Considering
that the event had been conceived in collaboration with
large institutions such as Goldsmiths College/ London
University and Witte de With/ Rotterdam, and funded by
the Culture Foundation/ Germany, there was doubt as to
how "non- alignment" could accommodate such support.
The mode of non-alignment was of course not meant as
a dogmatic or separatist stance, but one might argue that
the aforementioned institutions can be seen as dominant
centers for the production of particular discourses around
art, culture and politics. Since it was the network of people
surrounding those institutions that were prominently
programmed into the main theatre hall, summit appeared
as somewhat aligned. We wondered how hosting or
encompassing other kinds of speech and initiative would
be attempted under these conditions, and how familiar
or established knowledge's could be superseded- as the
proposals of "un-learning" and "un-aligning" indicated.
If the question of (non-) alignment was to be at the heart
of the summit, then its translation into open practices of
curation, organization, facilitation, participation and speech
was to be highly relevant to the success of the event. If
the conditions and spaces for organizing and contesting
this are not made extremely transparent, the alignments
and relations between actors (specifically organizers
but also institutions) can come to obstruct processes of
engagement.
"Summit"
The decision to run this event as a "summit" seemed to be
based on the immediate political context of the time (G8),
as well as a certain format of meeting and the roles played
by its attendants:
SUMMIT is neither a conference nor an informal forum or
open space. It is designed as a gathering that borrows the
grammar of the dramaturgy of meetings of heads of state
- just a few days before the G-8 meeting in Heiligendamm
near Rostock is taking place.
SUMMIT is an experimental setup designed to find out
what happens if individuals, agents and protagonists
of a multitude of projects and initiatives come together
as delegates but can no longer speak on behalf of an
institution, an interest group, a professional organization or
a branch, let alone a nation state.
SUMMIT ignores the logics of representation and replaces
them with certain notions of access, self-authorization, and
collaboration, which we analyzed as main characteristics
of emerging new subjectivities that are constitutive for the
concepts of "activism" and "participation". [...] (22)
To some extent, at least rhetorically, the idea seems to be
to turn the exclusive format of a conventional summit on its
head, offering the role of delegate to potentially anyone and
setting up divergent spaces for negotiation and multiplicity.
However the distinction between facilitators/organizers,
delegates/contributors and participants/ attendants/
audience was formally maintained during summit. Prior
to the event, the website encouraged people to register
as delegates- which meant initially prompting acts of
self-authorization at the same time as a representational
framework for participation.
In most cases, contributors as well as audience
came in order to talk about a project, practice or group- so
that an exchange of strategies and experiences could take
place- however presenting themselves as individuals and not
in the name of institutions. The typical summit- format as
seen at the G8 implies varying levels of access and officially
assigned roles, which was hardly what summit set out to
reproduce. There were moments however when we could
clearly distinguish a periphery or second level from a central
space. The many attempts to break with this -on the part
of organizers as well as participants and attendants- were
partly fruitful, such as breaking with the architecture of a
theatre (stage- auditorium) and proposing amendments
to the formats as well as space. It however remained clear
that it would be down to the facilitating committee to finally
decide about the course of events.
Self-organization
There seemed to be great potentials in the modes of self-
organization proposed by the summit as well as within
activist practices such as the mobilizations against the G8.
Operating on a horizontal basis is crucial to such projects,
and the creation of conditions for this to occur is a difficult
task. Summit undertook various attempts to live up to
practices of self- organization, 1) through making spaces
for speaking about and practicing them, 2) through allowing
for a part of the program to be non- centrally organized
and remain flexible. The summit drew together a broad
spectrum of self- organized initiatives for discussion and
hopefully the various relations and conversations that took
place informally as well as formally, including the heated
debate on the final evening, can bring forth different links
and collaborations that go beyond the three-day space and
conditions of the summit.
There was the intention of producing a jointly written and
edited declaration at the end of the three days, which
would, potentially, be presented to the European Ministers
of Education. (23) The conflicts and imbalances outlined
above led to a general disagreement over the idea of a
declaration. Our impression was that this was not only
because of the participants rejection of formats such as
declaration or manifesto (and the representational politics
this implies) but also because the event only reached a level
of intensive communication amongst all involved at the final
evening, marking the beginning of a broader debate about
how its editing could possibly have been done and who
was to be represented in such a declaration. The diversity
of approaches amongst participants obviously posed a
challenge to any efficient writing of a declaration, and
consensus over the discussed matters was hardly achievable
or indeed desirable after only three days and amongst such
a large crowd of actors. The size of the summit probably
accounted for many of the problems that occurred- solving
these on site would have required enormous efforts of
rearrangement and time dedicated to addressing possible
infrastructures for facilitating joint discussion amongst
some 200 persons.
Aside from the idea of a declaration as a way of
recording and condensing what had been said at summit,
and as a starting point for a new project, there are
possibilities of creating fora that may build on the process
of bringing together initiatives in learning culture, operating
alternatively to the commercialized systems of knowledge
production and sale. There was a shared feeling about the
urgent necessity to establish new modes of sharing and
forming knowledge, as well as instigating and furthering
platforms, databases or even parallel institutions that
would allow for a collection of different case studies in self-
organized initiatives, sharing strategies, methodologies
and tools. Open source is one of the means by which such
communication and archiving can become possible, and it
is important that the way this is done be rigorously open
and collaborative, with the aim of finding organizational as
well as discursive models that can support such practice.
The edu-factory, for instance, constitutes an attempt to
draw some of the projects and research around alternatives
to privatized and canonized education, and perhaps the
summit mailing list will come to serve as a means to work
towards something similar. (24) With all the parties involved
in summit, there is certainly scope thinking these initiatives
further.
Conclusion
In this text we have examined only partial aspects from
two vastly different initiatives that occurred in response
to the G8 in Heiligendamm. Despite their radical alterity,
both developed similar problems in terms of attempting to
overcome problems of hierarchy and exclusion associated
with centralized representative political models. During the
course of the events we became aware of issues emerging
from the replication of certain tendencies of models of
organization they were deliberately trying to deviate from.
These were broadly associated with logistical tensions of
concretely manifesting discursive sentiments of difference,
openness, flexibility, transparency, and heterogeneity.
We recognize both the Block G8 as well as the
summit as attempts to strengthen and further the neoliberal-
critical movements and work upon modes of organization
that can potentially go beyond traditional resistance. While
both were problematic in their facilitation, we believe
that there is great potential in developing these kinds of
alternative methods for organization. This requires further
rigorous and active contemplation and experimentation on
how speech and praxis can function in polyvalent, sustained
17
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
and transitory points of coincidence as well as convergence,
so that perhaps theory can be made urgent in practice.
We are aware that in many collectives and initiatives
traversing different disciplines, interests, locations and
knowledge's, viable and promising conceptualizations of
organization are being developed and set into motion. In
analyzing these two specific events, we hope we can help
to widen the scope of reflection on how we actualize what
we are saying in situations of resistance and expand the
boundaries of these initiatives, so that we may collectively
continue to make the possibilities of other worlds visible.
References
(1) Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. (1987) Dialogues. Trans,
by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: The
Althone Press, 145.
(2) For more logistical information on the Seattle protests,
and its planning refer to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/WTO_Ministerial_Conference_of_1999_protest_activity,
visited 15 June 2007.
(3) Graeber, D. (2002) "The new anarchists" in New Left
Review (13), 66.
(4) Hardt, M. (2002) "Today's Bandung - Porto Alegre" in
New Left Review (14), 117.
(5) For an outline of the G8 and its history refer to: Holzapfel
M. and Konig, K. (2002) "A History of the Antin Globalisation
Protests" Trans, by Nadezda Kinsky in Eurozine. [http://www.
eurozine.com/articles/2002-04-05-holzapfel-en.html]
(6) For a timeline of the protest events and its protagonists
see Indymedia Germany http://de.indymedia.org/ticker/en/,
visited 14 June 2007.
(7) For a full list of the groups that formed this coalition,
see Block G8 (2007) http://www.block-g8.org/index.
php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3<emid=8, visited
4 June 2007.
(8) Refer to call from Interventionist Left (2007) http://
dissentnetzwerk.org/node/2198, visited 4 June 2007.
(9) See Block G8 FAQ (2007) http://www.block-g8.org/index.
php?option=com_content&task=view&id=44& ltemid=58,
visited 4 June 2007.
(10) Refer to call from Interventionist Left (2007).
(11) See FelS "Call to action" (2007) http://dissentnetzwerk.
org/node/2957, visited 15 June 2007.
(12) From email circulated on G8 International mailing list
(24 June 2007). Titled: [g8-int] autonomous evaluation.
(13) See Block G8 FAQ (2007). See also Block G8 "Call
to Action" (2007) http://dissentnetzwerk.org/node/1042,
visited 15 June 2007.
(14) London G8 debrief meeting notes (15 June
2007) on Indymedia UK http://www.indymedia.org.uk/
en/2007/06/373692.html, visited 16 June 2007.
(15) See Block G8 FAQ (2007).
(16) "Summit: call to come forth and unalign" (2007) http://
summit.kein.org/call, visited 19 May 2007.
(17) Schneider, F (2006) "Collaboration - 7 nodes on new
ways of learning and working together" on Kein. [http://www.
kein.org/node/89]
(18) Interview with Florian Schneider and Irit Rogoff (2007)
"Intentions of summit: interview with Irit Rogoff and Florian
Schneider" in Idea Arts + Society Magazine (26). [http://
summit.kein.org/node/520]
(19) Schneider, F (2006).
(20) Schneider, F and Rogoff, I. (2007).
(21) "Question: What do you mean by "non-aligned"?
Answer: SUMMIT sets out to propose and develop a notion
of "non-alignment" which refuses both, the privatization
and bureaucratization of knowledge and education. "Non-
alignment" also means that we try to disengage from binary
oppositions like "institutional" and "non-institutional",
"public" and "private", "formal" and "informal" [...]
Politically the term "non-aligned" relates to the "Non-Aligned
Movement": an alliance of states that considered themselves
not aligned with any of the two super-powers during the cold
war. The term "non-aligned" was coined by the Indian prime
minister Nehru, the origins of the "Non-Aligned Movement"
trace back to the conference of Bandung in 1955." Summit
FAQ (2007) http://summit.kein.org/node/254, visited 19
May 2007. See also "Non-aligned movement" in Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aligned_Movement, visited
12 May 2007.
(22) Summit FAQ (2007) http://summit.kein.org/node/519,
visited 19 May 2007.
(23) Schneider, F and Rogoff, I. (2007). Refer to Rogoff's
comment near conclusion of interview.
(24) edu-factory (2007) http://www.edu-factory.org/, visited
12 June 2007.
Anja Kanngieser is a phd candidate at the University of
Melbourne, Australia. She has been working on examining
the intersections between aesthetics and activism,
specifically german activist groups that use aesthetic
techniques as a means of articulating their dissent. She is
also involved in the future archive project, and works with
installation and radio, http://www.non-specialist.net/
Manuela Zechner coordinates the future archive project and
works with Critical Practice Research Cluster at Chelsea
College of Art and Design, London, as well as being engaged
in various other collaborative projects in the fields of
new media/ art and education. Her current work centers
around archives, dialogical practices and future studies.
www.futurearchive.org, www.thisappearance.org, www.
criticalpracticechelsea. org
COLLIDE/ COLLABO ^
days of diverse events at Chelsea College of Art and Design,
where five graduating students collaborated to present a
programme of talks, discussions, workshops and screenings
that aimed to bridge art and activism and create a critical
environment by engaging with many issues.
25th-29th June 2006
information at collide-collabo.org
documentation of the collaborative process: collabo.omweb.org
Eugenia Beirer/ Robin Bhattacharya/ Jonathan Entwistle/
Grim Svingen/ Manuela Zechner
The cultural/ creative industries
The so-called creative industries are flourishing; in advanced
capitalist societies, knowledge and creativity become ever
more important for economies. The myth of creativity, and
the idea of artistic independence and freedom play a large
role in the recruitment of masses for production as well as
consumption of knowledge goods. How do artists re-position
themselves in relation to these developments, and wha
might it mean to study at Chelsea College of Art and Design
at this point?
This 3-part panel session starts off an introduction-discus-
sion of the cultural/ creative industries.
Following this, there will be a presentation/discussion with
Critical practice, a collaborative research cluster at Chelsea
College working with open source (or FLOSS) methodologies,
on their strategies of working within the creative sector, and
how they view the idea of creativity in that context.
The third part of this event will present Different systems of
chaos, a film by Steven Eastwood and Anya Lewin, exploring
alternative administrative strategies within an art school in
Lithuania. After the 20-minute screening, an open discussion
can take place, allowing us to reflect on our roles within the
creative industries- as art students, teachers, practicioners.
Art and the Market
Contemporary art is a billions of £s big industry, catering to
the wealthiest of society all over the globe, it can be found-
wherever there is a market.
From the instant-caricatures sold to passers-by on a square
in touristic areas, to the galleries currently opening up from
Shanghai to Mombai - works of art are the goods traded
therein and so are a product like anything else. The only
difference of art, is the claim that it is considered 'cultur-
ally valuable' too, even if there is not a market to be found
immediately.
A discussion among current art-students and future artists,
on their different perspectives of the art market, how to
make a living in it and how to retain artistic autonomy in the
eye of commercialisation.
Free Market Day
Monday 26.6. 09:00AM sharp: we assemble outside Chelsea
College of Art and Design. From there we all take part in an
active day dealing with issues of global trade and economy
by discussing the idea of Tree' market trade whilst seeing
consequences of this system for ourselves.
After gathering outside Chelsea College of Art and Design
we move on, by foot or by bike, to New Covent Garden
Wholesale Market in Vauxhall. Here we will pick up food that
is left behind - deemed unfit for distribution to London's
stores and supermarkets. At the market we will witness the
dumping of large amounts of food. We would like to crea-
tively explore, document and express our experience on this
day! Digital cameras and other equipment and material will
be made available to the participants to produce text, im-
ages or drawings or even performances- it is up to you!
From New Covent Garden Market we will return to Chelsea
College of Art to collectively wash and prepare the food in
the gallery space. We will share the prepared meal and en-
gage with issues that has come up during the day. After the
meal we will all help each other to clean up.
After this, the group can freely disperse, but will be invited
back for an informal screening/exhibition of images and
other work produced during the day.
18
PLAY BAC K, PLAY FORWA R D
The commercialisation of education
What does a successively trade-driven approach to educa-
tion mean for learning/ teaching within educational institu-
tions, and how does it relate to our experiences at Chelsea
college of Art? What do/can Unions do, and how do we
address these issues?
In a first panel, representatives of NATFHE and PCS present
their Unions' work and speak about the role of Unions in
contemporary society and educational frameworks. Follow-
ing this, we jointly discuss questions that arise.
The aim of the second panel is to increase transparency
regarding the financial administration and hierarchical
structure within Chelsea College. A finance administrator/
manager from the institution is to give a presentation of
structures/flows within the College. If they decline, thosep-
resent engage in a speculative drawing session, trying to
represent the (imagined) hierarchies within our educational
institution/s. The work created will be exhibited during the
degreeshow. The third session will engage all those present,
in conjunction with the University of the Arts Students
Union, in a discussion about learning within contemporary
educational frameworks.
Revolution vs. The Movement vs. The
Network?? ■ a history of resistance.
You are invited to take part in a discussion about political
and social activism in the digital domain.
Where do the diverse forms of popular political initiatives
that exist online (such as REVOL.TV), connect with grass-
root political activity? How do they relate to the wider 'move-
ments for social change' and what is their historical context?
We are going to talk about our experiences and would love
to learn from you. Please come down for an informal talk
that might end up being just as much about creating new
connections!
Critical Survey Workshop
Letting 100 questions drawn up by Karl Marx' for a french
worker inquiry (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
works/1880/04/20. htm) guide us, we will arrange a 'critical
survey' methodology workshop. We will introduce this kind
of research in a historical context and outline our method
for appropriating historical surveys to fit a contemporary
audience.
The aim is to arrange for a discussion to take place and
work with our generalized survey to create more personal-
ized surveys by working with participants to alter our pro-
posed survey to fit their particular life situation.
The new surveys will be digitalized and posted for downloa-
ing on our archive site and made available for printing in our
Degree Show space.
Participants will leave with material outlining a methodology
for surveying their particular condition with regards to work,
micro/macro politics and how power structures affect us
every day.
A Session with 'Critical Practice'
The Chelsea College based research cluster ((Critical Prac-
tice» (http://www.chelseawiki.org/wiki/index.php/Criti-
cal_Practice) suggest that the construction of society has
dramatic effects also on creative practices. This notion
fronts their joint academic and artistic initiatives.
We believe that our collaborative work for the degree show
reflects similar concerns. We wish to create a practice that
bridges artistic work and an active political life.
Therefore, we would like to invite the 'Critical Practice'
researchers to discuss the conditions of such a practice
in light of our experience of the society we live, work and
move within- as outlined in our proposal, here: http://www.
chelseawiki.org/wiki/index.php/Criticallnvitation
We would like to raise the issue of whether it is still useful
to refer to the artist 'form.' It seems to us that the super-
structures of our societies deregulate this idea much like it
seems to suspend other forms of labour and knowledge into
insecure relationships with and within society on a whole.
From a certain point of view, the tactics employed by people
engaged in the creative industries in order to respond to this
reality (as can be said to be exemplified by our degree show
work) seems to have similar results as the artist 'form' is
used only when it is effective towards an objective.
We are inviting 'Critical Practice' to discuss this, get their-
many views, attempt an overview of these issues and also
look at them with regards to the institutions of the crea-
tive industries, such as Chelsea College of Art and Design.
Whatever form the event might take, we wish for it to take
place in an informal setting open to the public.
Collaborative behaviour and desicion
making 'Gameshop'
We will attempt to introduce a variety of material into a
context of collaborative behaviour and decision-making
processes. Through games and exercises we will approach
these concepts in ways that ranges from the biological to
the educational!
Participants will be asked to engage in a playful, yet in-
depth, workshop on collaborative decision-making models.
Amongst other things we will play a repeated game of 'the
prisoner's dilemma' and see what we can learn from popular
education schemes! A 'gameshop' can be many things. You
are invited to take part in shaping its content!
Culture Jamming workshop
'Jamming,' 'Subverting,' 'Adbusting' and 'Flash mob' are
words referring to small or big creative subversive actions.
'Culture Jamming' stands for the act of transforming exist-
ing mass media into something that produces negative
commentary about itself. Actions are taken on advertising
industry, advertising campaigns, chain stores and multina-
tional corporations, public/private spaces, TV. and consum-
er culture...
Culture Jamming originated in the Situationist International
- an international political and artistic movement which has
parallels with Marxism, Dadaism, Existentialism, Anti-con-
sumerism, Punk and Anarchism and formed in 1957.
At Chelsea College of Art, we will host an introduction to
this kind of work, before we go out and on to the streets of
London to commit, perform and jam ourselves.
Would you like to find out more about this form of creative
resistance and artistic activity and get involved? Feel invited
and free to join us and share tactics, thoughts and ideas and
contribute to making this a fun and meaningful day.
Al-Qaeda as an open-structure organi-
zation and idea-led movement
Is the enemy in the world-wide 'war on terror', Al-Qaida
(='the base'), nothing but a mythical construct? And its
leader, the most wanted man on earth, Osama bin Laden
is a ghost or the world's most powerful media artist? All we
have ever heard or seen of Bin Laden are an audio-message
once in a while and his rare TV-appearance in a self-made
video.
SOMA workshop
REFRESHES THE PARTS capitalism steals from you. We are
very happy to have Jorge Goia with us for this event.
Goia explains:
'SOMA is a series of physical workshops, which are basedon
principle of self -organisation. SOMA is always conducted in
groups with an emphasis on the autonomy of the individual
within the support of the group.
SOMA is concerned with the politics, not of institutions, but
of everyday life. With so many blatant and latent repressive
forces in society the search for your own health, pleasure
and happiness can be a highly political act.
At the beginning of the 1970's, SOMA was created in Brazil
by Roberto Freire as a means of resistance to help people
fighting against the military dictatorship. SOMA uses drama
games, sound and movement exercises and Capoeira to help
salvage spontaneity, playfulness, communication, creativity
and awareness of anarchist organization where no one is
boss. The body is the material to resist and create within the
world. The pleasure of being yourself challenges the body
forgotten, develops new skills and turns the capitalist reality
upside down.'
Past, present and future of collabora-
tive practice at Chelsea
The degree show of 2005 featured several parts that formed
a collaborative effort of a group of students. Especially
relating to open-source software principles, they created
o
03
O
O
CD
an environment for collaborative creative production and Ouo
exchange. Several of us participated last year and, now ^
graduating, this year are trying to do something not entirely
different, by collaboratively organizing a series of events
in a shared space, thus challenging again the expectations
towards a college degree show. The exchange of ideas and
experience with the prior generation of students has been a
crucial catalyst in our understanding of art education.
This event is to look at similarities and differences, in both
the processes and the resulting projects. Therefore we invite ^
former students and future graduates, to find out what we —
have learned from each other, what same mistakes we made o
and how we can avoid them in the future. ^
Joint effort - self assessment I
The organizing group will assess the weeks' events and ^
learning experiences, and discuss future collaborations and
projects. This is not a public event per se- if you wish to
however, feel free to come in and talk to us.
19
PLAY BAC K, PLAY FORWA R D
fcuO
o
03
CD
CO
CD
O
CD
O
O
03
03
O
O
CRITICAL PRACTICEarea
self-governing cluster of artists, re-
searchers and academ ICS, hosted by Chelsea
College of Art And Design. Through our Aims we intend to
support critical practice within art, the field of culture and
organization.
Register to contribute to this Wiki and join the Mailing List -
they are the primary channels of communication.
We recognize dramatic transformations in creative practice.
Transformations instigated by, and a reflection of wider
social, political, technological and financial changes. One of
the most obvious affects, is that as artists, curators, design-
ers or theorists, our practices, or their interpretation, or how
they are theorized, historicized or organized, are no longer
separate concerns, or indeed the prerogative of different
disciplines. Currently, we are concerned by the threat of the
instrumentalisation of the artistic field through the inter-
nalisation of corporate values, methods and models. This
can be seen everywhere, in funding agencies, at art schools
and academies, in museums and galleries, and even in the
studios of artists!
Therefore, we seek to avoid the passive reproduction of art,
and uncritical cultural production. Our research, projects,
exhibitions, publications and funding, our very constitution
and administration become legitimate subjects of critical
enquiry.
All art is organised, so we are trying to be sensitive to issues
of organisation. Governance emerges whenever there is a
deliberate organisation of interactions between people. We
are striving to be an 'open' organization, and to make all
decisions, processes and production, accessible and public.
We will post agendas, minutes, budget and decision-making
processes online for public scrutiny; as advised by open-
organization. org
The research elements pursued under the auspices of Criti-
cal Practice will engage with the various forces that are im-
plicated in the making of art, and the increasingly devolved
experience of art made available through art institutions to
their audiences.
We will explore new models for creative practice, and look
to engage those models in appropriate public forums, both
nationally and internationally; we envisage participation in
exhibitions and the institutions of exhibition, seminar and
conferences, film, concert and other event programmes. We
will work with archives and collections, publication, broad-
cast and other distributive media and funders; while actively
seeking to collaborate.
We are currently in the process of defining our aims and
objectives.
AIMS
aims are broad statements of aspiration.
Our aims are currently under revision, please feel free to
revise them, we hope to achieve our aims by delivering our
objectives
Critical Pratice aims to:
Aim 1
We will explore the field of cultural production as a site of
resistance to the logic, power and values of the ideology of
a competitive market. (Our political economy)
Aim 2
We will reflect critically upon, and act creatively within the
contexts in which we operate - including the very conditions
of our own possibility. (Our critique of form)
Aim 3
We will work as an open, collaborative and reflexive social
network, while actively seeking to engage with others, (our
method of research production)
Aim 4
We aim to ensure that the impact of our research is in
inverse proportion to the energy consumed in producing it.
(Our ethos of production)
Aim 4: appendix
This needs to be clarified as it could be read as meaning
either that we undertake research that is profligate with
energy and has a low impact(!) or that we do research that
uses little energy but is high in its impact (which the Objec-
tives goes for)...
Aim 5
We will return publicly funded research to the public do-
main. (Our ethos for dissemination)
Aim 6
We intend to engage Critical Practice with Chelsea College
of Art and Design, and sustain its presence as a supportive
infrastructure.
OBJECTIVES are the means of
achieving our aspirational aims.
A simple acronym used to set objectives is called SMART
Specific - Objectives should specify what they want to
achieve.
Measurable - You should be able to measure whether you
are meeting the objectives or not.
Achievable - Are the objectives you set, achievable and
attainable?
Realistic - Can you realistically achieve the objectives with
the resources you have?
Time - How much time is needed to achieve the set objec-
tives?
These, as well as our aims are constantly under revision,
please feel free to amend and change.
Our objectives are:
Objective 1
To practise creatively wherever possible - throughout the
life-time of the cluster of interests that constitute Critical
Practice - by engaging with public institutions, through us-
ing open-content licensing, and Free Libre and Open Source
(FLOSS) methodologies. (Related to Aim 1.)
Objective 2
To continually and critically peer-review our work, constitu-
tion and practice. This includes our research methods, our
projects, exhibitions, publications, funding, organizational
practice and administration (Related to Aim 2.)
Objective 3
To evolve and continually refine procedures - eg our aims
and objectives, our organizational habits - using [http://
www.open-organization.org Open-Organization guidelines
where appropriate - for realizing our open and transparent
working practices. To pursue a range of creative projects in-
volving collaborative social networks; both for their intrinsic
value and for the purposes of interrogating the organization
and practice of those collaborative networks. (Related to
Aim 3.)
Objective 4
To always avoid forms of production that are profligate with
energy and non-renewable resources. (Related to Aim 4.)
Objective 5
To develop procedures for returning publicly funded re-
search to the public domain e.g. sharing our knowledge and
resources with others via the integration of research into
teaching, through using open-content licensing, and by do-
nating resources to Chelsea's library.(Related to Aim 5.)
Aim 1: appendix
We are concerned by the threat of the instrumentalisation
of the artistic field by a wholesale internalisation of corpo-
rate values, methods and models. This can be seen every-
where from art schools, to museums and galleries, and even
the studios of artists!
The complexity and diversity of contemporary art practice
has exceeded traditional patronage models of financial
remuneration. The buying and selling of artifacts cannot
encompass the complex mix of research, self employment,
employment, underemployment, enterprise, continuous
study and professional development that characterise
contemporary art practice. Urn, we'd like to think about
this.
Aim 2: appendix
To this end Critical Practice seeks to avoid the passive
reproduction of cultural production. Therefore our research,
projects, exhibitions, publications and funding, our very
constitution and administration become legitimate subjects
of critical enquiry.
Aim 3: appendix
We are trying to be sensitive to issues of governance
Governance emerges whenever there is a deliberate organi-
zation of interactions between people. Therefore we are
striving to be an 'open' organization, and to make all deci-
sions, processes and production, accessable and public.
We will post agendas, minutes, points of action, budget and
decision making processes on line for public scrutiny; as
advised by http://www.open-organization.org
We aim to be a flexible, social network of individuals or
organizations. This indicates the ways in which we are con-
nected through various social familiarities ranging from pro-
fessional and academic relationships to friends, colleagues
and casual acquaintances.
We recognise cultural production as a fundamentally social
and collective endeavour, beyond the particulars of ego and
property - to operate on these particulars is to exercise a
restriction upon creativity.
We aim to work closely with our collaborators, sharing and
discussing ideas and projects. Critical Practice considers all
staff, students, as well as those not affiliated with Chelsea
as participant and potential participants.
Aim 5: appendix
This includes sharing our research and organizational
practices at every opportunity at Chelsea College of Art and
Design, as well as making this research freely available to
others.
Aim 6: appendix
I'm not sure what 'its' refers to in this sentence: Chelsea
College of Art & Design or Critical Practice - both of which,
of course, could be supportive infrastructures - so perhaps
we need 'their' instead of 'its'?
20
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
VOCABULABORATORIES
Paz Rojo/Manuela Zechner
We are proposing a set of gestures here, that come in a tool-
box. Or maybe a game.
The vocabulary, as the starting point for a series of labs that
take place in different contexts, offers proposals, ideas, ne-
ologisms, choreographies, quotes and cues that hint towards
possible relations, questions and strategies that inform the
practice of the vocabulary- writers (in the case of the terms
below, Paz Rojo and Manuela Zechner).
We are proposing an experiment with the discourses, ideas
and thought architectures that hold together some of the
things we are currently interested in, in a rather net-like and
puzzled way. We are interested in how language and concepts
hold our practice together;and how our practice further con-
flicts or holds these ideas in approach. We are talking about
concepts as glue that holds the relations, spaces-in-between
persons and things and systems, and are interested how
go from there to movement, action and gestures and back
again.
She said:
I'd like then, to move these questions into the territory of the
performative. This is related to idea of production of knowl-
edge. Well have the definitions, but also we have our doings
to interrupt or displace their very definition or what they may
represent
We like to consider this as a manual for a response-able ma-
chine. This manual will not offer you rules or definitions, but
images, stories and at best scripts. It's written in plenty of
languages and tongues which we tried not to master neces-
sarily, but to incorporate in one way or another, and so the
whole thing is prone to error. The form our experiment takes
is that of a vocabulary-becoming-manual. The way to read,
handle or play this vocabulary is up to you to decide. We are
putting our game in question at the same time as we are play-
ing it- you can follow us as we do this, and add your ideas.
Vocabulaboratories engages processes of vocabulary- writ-
ing and the translation of vocabulary terms into intervention-
ist practice. The laboratories are set in arts and educational
contexts, engage collective and singular processes of writing
towards an online open content archive of entries that consti-
tute attempts by different people to map the stakes they hold
in different concepts or terms.
The project is to be launched in 2008. The entries below are
from an initial vocabulary as elaborated by Manuela and Paz
in 2007:
Author-ship
what does it mean to get on the author- ship? the author-ship
is a vessel that ripens in a complex context of economy, cul-
ture and psychologies., it is built in a type 5X1 factory, under
hard pressure and with sophisticated technologies from both
the new and the old ages.
some of its key development stages, underlying discourses
and characteristic movements are these:
production of legitimacy via mytho-logical gestures:
the genius, the source, the original, omnipotence and divine
privilege
paper- technology;
coincidence of the history of paper and the story about own-
ership of ideas
owner-ship technologies:
identification of "self" with "own"- the self as in possession
of ones own person (Locke and proprietary individualism),
one being the master of oneself, consciousness as constitu-
tive to claiming to be a subject (to own oneself)- hence intern-
ment of the insane (dis-owning themselves of them-selves)
technologies of authority:
supposed protection of authenticity via enforcement of laws
proposal for a different build of maker-ship:
relational technologies:
"mine" does not necessarily refer to ownership, but also to
relation:
this is my pen (proprietary)/ this is my mother (relationship)/
this is my poem (usually interpreted as proprietary, but why
not relational)
collaborative methodologies for relational technologies:
replacing "owning" by "owning up to"- belonging to, in the
sense of sharing certain communialities and response-abil-
ities, collaboration as a way of rethinking relationships in
terms of caring and concern, not property
countermovements to appropriative gestures:
to affirm the self-created or self-acquired as property, hence
as exclusively owned by the self, is a gesture of brutality, as
it ignores and excludes a whole spectrum of other relations,
meanings and and potentials, and renders relational own-ing
impossible
see also " my" wife- brutality, patriarchy and the advent of
property
countermovements:
authorship, authority and obedience: "gehoren" in german-
latin: obeodire- to belong/ to obey- die frau gehort dem ehe-
mann, der hund gehort der frau, der film gehort dem regis-
seur- obedience/ control and ownership
performative discursivity:
not referring to originality but to performance- you don't own
or create an idea of course, you do it, and thereby stand in
relation to it
Collaboration
— verb 1 work jointly on an activity or project. 2 cooperate
traitorously with an enemy.
— ORIGIN Latin collaborare 'work together'.
what is the role of compromise in collaboration? collabora-
tion as a working with compromise or constraint creatively?
collaborations as a sensing and careful shifting together in
relation/ of relations (people- people/ things- people)? what
is the role of a common starting point, or degree zero, in
collaborative processes? to what extent does collaboration,
if posited as a paradigm or general principle, produce sem-
blances of equality (within a working group), to what extent
does it assure that distribution of power will be dealt with
responsibly in a group? can/ should collaboration be regu-
lated? how does collaboration relate to community, how to
cooperative, how to collective? what is the relationship be-
tween collaboration and democracy? (see also history of the
notion 'collaborateur' during/ after ww2 in france, how any-
one that did not resist the occupying nazi forces was seen to
have collaborated with them) what does it take to collaborate?
collaboration as an experimental setup enabling investiga-
tion into democratic processes? collaboration as a model? a
paradigm? a spirit? a concept? what role does affect play in
collaboration, what role does language play? collaboration as
engaging in imperfect intimacy? collaboration as shattering
of centralized viewpoints (there can be no one "outcome"-
no single result)? the suggestion of a strategy of multiplica-
tion (of author positions) rather than of a substraction (of
the author), if the definition of a collaborative project holds
the sum total (or multiplication) of the desires of those in-
volved, then the representation of it can also be as multiple
as the desires, the form of relation between the collaborat-
ing "group" and single persons is then one of synechdoche?
synechdoche as a mode of representation of collaborative
projects and their participants? what is the role of consensus
within forms of collaboration? collaboration as joint thinking
process (brainstorming..) as opposed to a process of pro-
duction or definition? collaboration as enhanced exploitation
of a set of cognitive resources; the think tank, the corpo-
ration, collaboration as temporary alliance? collaboration as
motivated by self-interest, not charity or sense of commu-
nity? what is at stake in collaboration is the self, do we seek
stability or continuity when we enter into collaboration? does
collaboration "reach out"? if yes, to whom, in what way dif-
ferently than a "collective" might reach out? what is the role
of a common goal within collaboration? when can collabora-
tive processes be said to start from a common aims? what
are these aims or goals concerned with; a form of produc-
tion, an ethics, a process? what use do corporations make of
collaboration? can the corporation be considered some kind
of antidote to collaboration as an idea? what is the relation-
ship between collaboration and complicity? what role does
the idea of non-representation of collaboration play- i.e. only
process, no product a kind of strategy of invisibility, abolish-
ing representation altogether?
Discourse
- ORIGIN Latin discursus 'running to and fro', from discur-
rere 'run away'.
what does it mean if I don't speak many of your discourses,
your languages? we will have to translate, of course, as i'm
not guest and you host, if we are both both, our foreign lan-
guages will not upset, insult or alienate eachother... but serve
as a basis for translation, and so negotiation. This will be a
pacing back and forth between you and me, here and there,
abstract and concrete, sometimes like couriers.
Imagine-ability expectation and specta-
torsnip
spectator- from latin spectare, to gaze at, observe
expect- from Latin exspectare look out for,' from ex- 'out' +
spectare 'to look'
spectacle- from Latin spectaculum 'public show,' from spec-
tare, speculate- from Latin speculat- 'observed from a vantage
point,' from the verb speculari, from specula 'watchtower,'
from specere 'to look.'
spectrum- from Latin, literally 'image, apparition,' from
specere 'to look.'
the possible image: what image is possible?
to imagine: to conjure up an image, to speculate on an image,
to look at a potential image.
what choices do we make, in the space between the imagi-
nary and the real?
what kind of negotiation takes place between the potential
and the reality of a situation?
what kinds of methods or gestures do we use to draw a real
out of an imaginary- to get from an idea(l) or a text to an
embodyment, an act, or an image?
we have to stand up and move, no doubt,
but what criteria do we have for choosing that movement? for
negotiating its correspondence to an imagined?
how do we per-form an image out of the open source of im-
agined and real?
- when or what is the moment when we become able to pic-
ture something, when we start to be able to visualize a future
situation?
- what or who is imagine-able
- what might determine the limits of a spectrum of specula-
tion- the limits of imagination?
- what does it take to pre-visualize a gesture or movement? a
knowledge of conditions and constraints of a situation...
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
- freedom is a psychokinetic skill?
- the leap between words and doings- what is the transfer
between the word or language, and the doing?
what kind of potential do we address, when we create images
and imaginings, of situations?
Vocabulary
- from Latin vocabulum, from vocare 'call.'
-[-ary] (suffix) from French -aire or Latin -arius 'connected
with' or Latin -aris
'belonging to.'
- sth that belongs to the voice.
- the body of words used in a particular persons language.
a vocabulary is something that belongs to the voice- to be
precise, an amorphous body of words that belongs to the
voice, similarly to the way in which a voice belongs to a body,
the vocabulary belongs to a voice, a vocabulary is a set of
specific words and concepts to become vocal with, when be-
coming vocal, the voice acts as the medium of translation
between text and context, it connects a word, a body, and a
situation, it is constantly changing.
i might ask; what does it mean for us to have these words,
and to work with them? but aside from the question what
does it mean to have a vocabulary, i want to ask: what does it
mean to know ones vocabulary and translate it to eachother
as well as into practice?
i mean not just to know my vocabulary by heart, not only to
have repeated it many times, half-consciousely, but to under-
stand and be able to rehearse it, methodologically, critically,
what does it mean to trace and describe the vocabularies
and discursive fields we're moving within? what are our dis-
courses, and where may they meet? how do we make this
encounter? how have these concepts been set out before, and
what hopes do we invest in them? What does it mean to define
them, and to personalize them?
I have a desire to understand how we relate to our vocabular-
ies, without trying to construct a stable system of meaning
or make a claim to truth. I want to see how we can play this;
use words without referring to a supposedly stable system of
meaning.
We will make the vocabulary the very terminus of the situa-
tion, finding potential ways of relating materials, questions,
desires, images, conversations, etc, and then to see:
what could this vocabulaboratorious translation of our ideas,
hopes and desires offer to other people? how can we offer it
to other people: vocabulaboratory as searching and arranging
of a somewhat archival space, as outcome of a collaborative
research and re-collection phase...
[in progess]
CD
X
o
_Q
O
O
H — '
CO
>>
T3
O
_Q
>>
CD
>
CD
T3
03
CD
_Q
CO
>>
TD
O
_Q
>>
CD
>
CD
EVERYBODYS
was conceived during a meeting in December 2005 following
the interest to implement Open Source as an artistic strategy
in the performing arts. One of the basic motivations with the
"open source methodology" was to develop new ways of shar-
ing knowledge and producing specific discourses within the
performing arts in order to redefine the conditions of work in
general and the parameters of exchange, to produce hetero-
geneous works, to escape the restricted accessibility to work,
and to deviate traditional conceptions of authorship. In a sec-
ond step, after some text-exchanges and meetings at the PAF
Summer University in August 2006, we (an open group based
on interest) faced more problems and questions than we had
initially started with.
Acknowledging the gap between performance and software de-
velopment, and therefore the impossibility of a direct transpo-
sition from open source strategies to performance practices,
we decided to rename the project "everybodys". By setting up
an internet platform for texts and discussion on http://every-
bodys.be our interest then drew on an exchange of our works
on a methodological level and on the creation of a database
for production models. One line of discussion was to develop a
Workshop Kit, encompassing tools and interview-games, which
would facilitate discussion on our work. This Kit is meant to
be developed by the ((integral feedback)) of usage, in order to
enhance its possibilities. The Workshop Kit is presented on the
everybodys.be for anyone to use and develop further.
Why Open Source?
The development model of free culture offers an alternative to
"collaboration" in the conventional sense, which requires peo-
ple to be in constant communication and to negotiate each
step of the artistic process. Using open source as a model
for exchange allows us to share each other's ways of work-
ing, or "codes", without necessarily producing the same work,
or even knowing each other personally. This is an alternative
modality to the more typical means of exchange— i.e. geo-
graphic and social connections through institutions or close
collaboration. Instead, everybodys develops horizontal and
asymmetrical paths for exchange. Moreover, the Open Source
model provides a research tool for learning about each other's
work methodologies, which everyone can then implement in
their own work. Open Source strategies allow the work practice
itself to be shared, and not merely the product; this provides
an alternative to the authority of the artist's signature and the
economic abuse of the romantic genius-artist image. Further-
more, by cracking our personal "codes" of working, we learn
how to fine-tune our own processes, creating more productivity
and possibilities for work, which when shared have the poten-
tial to affect the work practices of the global performing arts
community.
we will from now on use the root dictionary game to continue
this article.
«which everyone can then implement in their own work.
Open Source strategies allow the work practice itself to be
shared))
We strive for a multiplication of relations and of ways to af-
fect each other, based on an understanding that work is the
product of many varied influences, and thus cannot be evalu-
ated in terms of originality. What the author of a work owns is
the responsibility for a particular construction/combination
of tools (methods, techniques, etc.) and items (actions, im-
ages, sounds, etc.). This is a specific realization with a spe-
cific aim. Everything that can be used to make a work can
thus also be shared.
Everybodys is an open-ended experimental practice that can
appear in various forms, from web-site to magazine, from con-
versation to writing, from performance to work-shop, etc.
http://www.everybodys.be and http://www.everybodystool-
box.net
23
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
PLAYING FIELDS
Rozalinda Borcila
Critical practice
Economics are the method; the object is
to change the heart and soul - Margaret
Thatcher 1
Welcome to the new consciousness; we utilize
^ everyone - Lesego Rampolokeng
o I was born in the early 1970's, the decade that would
u m witness the annihilation of the radical left in the US, the
wholesale withdrawal of artistic and cultural practices in the
^ powerful West from revolutionary anti-capitalist ambitions,
the mobilization of what appeared to be democratic
consent ushering in the Thatcher/Reagan era. Welcome
to neoliberalism, the peculiar liberal-colonial reduction of
<\3 existence to its efficient management, become planetary
governance with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the supposed
^ final global triumph of capitalism.
^ After surviving the 1989 revolution and the
^ subsequent rapid injection of capitalism in Romania
\ between 1990-1992, I moved to the US to study sculpture
^ and performance. I would summarize this training as
q_ follows: using the body as an instrument for the (re)
^ organization of space. Over the next decade I struggled
j= to develop a practice that would be performative in a
social sense, in that it would be done collectively by a
range of participants who may occupy different positions,
at various relative distances, within a social process. In
this sense the sculptural dimension engages the ways in
which social practices generate different understandings or
experiences of space. My work has attempted to interrogate
the seemingly contradictory forms of spatialisation that
characterize neoliberal globalization. On the one hand, the
apparently 'undifferentiated', fluid space of capital. On the
other hand, the concentration of social power, the violent re-
inscription of borders, the increasingly rigid, unyielding and
authoritarian forms of spatialisation and governance.
The question such a practice must confront is
whether it is still possible to speak of artistic interrogation
or critique. Since the 80's, the aesthetic has been mobilized
within the circuits of capital as both compensatory and
preemptive: compensatory in the sense of philanthropy or
'giving back to a payoff for the devastation of capitalism
which must, however, never never involve a redistribution
of material resources or control over the conditions of
one's life and work; preemptive or deflective in the sense of
managing the threat of systemic critique through aesthetic
pleasure2. This is especially problematic in the so-called
participatory, relational or community arts genres, deployed
on a grand scale in the global art market since the mid
1990's.
An example of a specific work will serve to anchor this
larger question, and hopefully to suggest some of the
possibilities and limitations of critical art practice today.
A few disclaimers are in order. Firstly, I am a resolutely
amateur writer, whose practice is not discursive and who is
wary of treating all phenomena and experiences as text (or
which can be read as though they were texts). Secondly, at
the risk of stating the obvious, speaking about space and
producing it are not the same thing. Finally, our language is
already spatial(ized) in ways that do not seem to me to be
very productive (inside/outside, micro/macro, fluid/rigid,
local/global and so on ).
Borders
To be eligible for naturalization you must be
a person of good moral character INS will
make a determination on your moral character
based upon the laws Congress has passed.
The naturalization courts generally exercised
wide discretion and applied an elastic test in
determining whether the character requirements
had been satisfied... 3
For the sculptor/performer, the border as a space of
power has a specific materiality and absolute coordinates
which must be understood. But power is also located in
relative and immaterial spaces (of access, distance, flows
and dispersals), in specific institutional, corporeal and
aesthetic practices, technologies and discourses, and
in subjectivity. An artistic intervention is not an analysis
of, or discussion about the border as a device of social
power, nor is it intended in this case to make visible the
wvarious components that constitute the device, according
to often problematic assumptions that link increased
representational visibility with political agency. Rather, the
goal is to produce a certain breakdown and repurposing of
these components and of the system of relations within
which they operated
The artwork in question is part of a larger project
entitled 'The Elastic Test'5, which developed over multiple
stages between 2002-2004 as a roving, location-specific
interrogation of 'naturalization'. The idea was simple:
to create poetic re-staging of immigration practices by
examining the multiple dimensions of social valuation,
as collaborative performances within specific institutional
contexts.
In August 2002 this project involved a group of
art students from the University of the Witswatersrand
in Johannesburg. These young people worked to develop
three intrusive quasi-medical procedures, collectively
designing them and then offering themselves as the first
group of subjects. Involving the measurement, calibration
and "tracing" of facial features and various body parts,
and subjecting the body to physical pressures at the
limits of its pliability and elasticity, the procedures were
self-consciously modeled after colonial and Apartheid-era
practices of racial classification. The project unfolded in
Johannesburg in August 2002, overlapping two moments
we considered of particular significance. The first was a
national ceremony, televised live on Woman's Day, August
9 th : the burial of Saartjie Baartman, following the return
of her remains from Europe. The second was the World
Summit held in Johannesburg at the end of August, which
mobilized extensive programs to "sanitize" the city, as the
Rainbow Nation prepared to cast itself convincingly as a
player in the global economy. Thus, we were also concerned
with the reconfiguration of systemic violence within
globalized neoliberal capitalism. The performances self-
consciously referenced the ways in which the (black, female)
body is a site for both colonial exploitation and national
emancipation, as well a vehicle through which nationhood
is leveraged to forcibly open up new markets for the
unfettered accumulation of capital. The symbolic violence
of the performances -- entitled simply "Lips, Skin and Hips
Tests" -- was conceived in relation to the political struggles
on the streets of Johannesburg, as thousands mobilized to
protest the predatory and speculative liberalization of basic
resources and services in post-Apartheid South Africa.
In 2003, I invited artist and colleague Robert
Lawrence to collaborate on the third installment of the
project, as part of the Mountain Standard Time Festival in
Calgary, and it is this particular stage of the project I wish
to focus on in this essay. We proposed the project to the
Nickle Arts Museum, intending to transform the physical,
institutional and social space of the museum into a border
(counter)device. This would mean, for us, examining and
repurposing the various existing constitutive components of
what we would consider our 'location'. We would focus on 3
specific aspects, briefly described below.
In Canadian Immigration Law, the 'skilled worker' is
a category of naturalization eligibility established through a
point system, which determines the applicant's adaptability
and economic worthiness. Human capital became important
for us to explore, not just as a trope produced in various
discursive sites, but also as a kind of subjectivity - we
became interested in the ways individual and collective
subjectivity operates within capitalism to produce the self
as capital, as a speculative futures investment.
The Nickle Arts Museum holds a significant
numismatic collection, particularly strong in Royal Canadian
Mint and Imperial Roman coinage. At the same time
instruments of propaganda, imperial identity cards and
tools for the homogenization/integration of conquered
provinces, the links between coinage, power, sovereignty,
warfare and symbolic power are complex. In addition,
multiple contradictory systems of valuation come into
play when considering the specific coins in the collection
(insurance value, historical value, market value, artistic
value etc)
An art auction was taking place in the adjacent area
of the Museum, consisting mostly of Canadian regional
landscape art and collectively entitled 'Beyond the Beauty'.
During the auction, the value of Canadian-ism fluctuates
as different bids are made. We decide to create our
performance as an intervention in the auction, exploiting not
only the (presumed) privileged status of museum visitors
on such a particular occasion, but also the relationships
between the aesthetic and the national.
Playing nice?
In previous installments of this performance/intervention,
I had engaged a range of co-participants and publics in
interrogating existing immigration policies and social
valuation tropes. In each location, we would collaboratively
produce a performative re-staging of 'naturalization tests',
which would be executed upon an unsuspecting art public.
In its strictest and simplest form, a reversal was necessary
- the strategic and poetic function of 'fucking with the
powerful', (as one participant in Johannesburg put it), who
would become subjects of often hyperbolized versions of
existing technologies of exclusion, is not the purpose of
such practice, but rather a crucial prerequisite. It became
necessary to stop playing nice - and to introduce, in the
mechanism of the evaluative performance, the question
of empowerment and disempowerment as redistributive,
embodied and shared.
With a great deal of support from the Mountain
Standard Time curators, Robert and I began to create
workshops in two different contexts: one was an art
class at the University of Calgary, the other an English
language class for asylum seekers at the Canadian Catholic
Immigration Society. We introduced ourselves to workshop
participants and proposed to them the following scenario:
as artists interested in immigration, we would like to
design a language-based game, modeled after Canadian
Immigration procedures. This game would take place
at the Nickel Arts Museum, interrupting an auction; we
invited workshop participants to help design the game,
with the understanding that the 'players' or subjects of the
game would be the Museum public: consisting largely of
middle/upper class Canadian art collectors on one hand,
and performance festival goers on the other. We offered a
basic structure as a starting point: a grid, a questionnaire,
points, the use of coinage, various possibilities for marking
territories within an open space. Through discussions, play,
testing out possible scenarios together, the complex rules of
our game became flushed out.
Questions began to emerge about power, control
and compliance. What are the stakes in such a game,
and how far are we willing to go in exploring the dynamic
of desire and coercion - as the very structure or logic of
such a game? We drew upon the experiences of workshop
participants to create a navigational/evaluative game with
serious and very real stakes: the game begins with the loss
of one's Canadian ID, which the player must then struggle
to re-acquire. Such 'deep play' required the commitment of
the artists, curators and game designers towards very real
possible risks.
The ethics of such work are always troubling.
Politics becomes for us intensely implicated in negotiating
the positions, emotions and desires of all those involved,
and trying to create situations that do not pretend to
operate as 'horizontal' - in other words, to acknowledge
the asymmetry of our relationships, the different relative
positions occupied by various co-participants in the process.
The artists, whose privileged subjectivity and social position
threatens to colonize the project, must be willing to put
themselves at extreme risk, to look for strategic ways to
leverage their position (access to the museum as a platform,
to mechanisms of legitimation and so on). They must
also be willing to undermine the very institution that is
24
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
supporting them by revealing its complicity with power, and
by working aggressively with the institutions' patrons.
The Game
Good moral character, a question of fact, has
been interpreted as meaning character which
measures up to the standards of average
citizens of the community in which the applicant
res ides... 6
The evening of the auction, a small registration
table is set up at the museum entrance. The visitor is
politely asked for their Canadian ID and in exchange receives
a Valuation Card to hang around their neck. It contains
specific instructions, a score card, and their ID number. It
becomes apparent only later that this score card must be
completed before the player can re-acquire their ID.
Workshop participants? play the role of agents.
They wear white shirts, with several pens tucked into breast
pockets. Their gestures are beurocratic: stamping, initialing,
stapling; they check documents; they click their pens;
they helpfully direct traffic. A looped audio recording plays
navigating instructions that reinforce some basic rules: If
you have a question, raise your hand and an agent will be
right with you. Thank you for your cooperation.
The next stage of the game takes the player through
the museum lobby, past the gift shop, beyond the auction
room to a large adjacent subspace, organized as a 10 x
10 grid. Players must navigate this grid; the initial and
destination coordinates are based on the first and last digits
of the ID number. In each position, they read and respond to
questions, receiving points based on responses. Questions
are extracted from discussions with workshop participants
and/or Immigrations questionnaires. On the back of the
question cards are images and descriptions of coins from
the Nickle collection, which are also projected on a wall at
the end of the space. The more astute players recognize
that points can also be scored on the back. Sample question
cards:
(images or texts excerpted from question cards
inserted here)
Periodically, agents may check score cards and convert
points into real moneys, excitedly disbursed in nickels,
dimes and quarters from change belts (similar to the
ones worn by casino workers) - this noisy reward system
attracts the interest of players in neighboring positions.
Specific areas of the grid may have more point earning
potential; some players begin to strategize their navigation.
Small micro-economies emerge as players begin to swap
question cards or positions; some players 'relativise' their
self-assessments, others devise strategies to either prolong
navigation - in the search for more points - or to finish as
quickly as possible, which becomes more and more urgent
as preparations for the auction next door are audibly under
way.
If a player's card is invalidated for any reason
(cheating, a technical mistake, stepping off the grid without
prior authorization etc), or if they wish to access the auction
room, they must retrieve their ID from the registration table.
But at this station only one exchange is possible, and only in
one direction: the registration agent takes ID's in exchange
for cards, not the other way around. A disgruntled player
demands their ID and is denied; he requests to see who
is in charge, but each agent refers him to the next agent,
and the next, and the next... the situation deteriorates, the
player becomes aggressive and threatens to call the police.
Quickly, his companions' laughter (his family??) pressures
him into submission - compliance is enforced between
players through embarrassment and the threat of exposure
as culturally unsophisticated ('what's the matter with you??
Cant you tell it's a performance!!'). Though the registration
agent refuses, for the duration of the game, to return ID's,
he may or may not disburse additional score cards in
exchange for shoes, small personal items, a credit card, a
kiss...
Once the completion of grid navigation is certified
by an agent, players are authorized to leave the grid and
are directed to cue at the accounting table. Accountants
make little to no eye contact; they tally points, check for
errors on all question cards, tally up numismatic points
and moneys won, validate or invalidate all score cards. The
player is returned their ever-increasing stack of paperwork
and directed to the evaluation table. One player's card is
invalidated for navigating the grid diagonally; he demands
to see the director of the museum, who is however also
trapped somewhere within the grid. Impatient players
cueing behind the dissenter apply pressure based, this time,
on the principle of efficiency ('c'mon man, I don't have all
nightY).
The cue at the valuation table is even longer. Players
chat and may compare cards, at times discovering only at
this late stage the (underexploited) value of the historical
coinage on the back of their question cards. At the table,
evaluation agents are chatty, helpful. Each player is informed
they have not accrued sufficient points to re-acquire their
ID (all questions about what amount of points is necessary
are answered by simply quoting a higher number than the
player's current total - one can, simply put, never have
enough points). However, valuation agents encourage the
player to demonstrate additional skills they may have,
ways in which they may bring a valuable contribution to
Canadian society. Their gentle reassurance encourages
players to offer a wide range of skills: some recite poems,
write recipes, do drum solos, quote extensively from tax
laws, offer investment tips - most wildly enjoyed by still
cueing players. After each demonstration, a brief evaluation
results in additional points offered and a PENDING tag
is gingerly tied around the player's index finger. The final
station is the pending area, situated behind the valuation
area, the only place where players can see the space in its
entirety. From here they may observe the implementation of
a 'regime change' - the agents swarm the grid and assault
players' score cards with hole punchers, as the voice in the
loudspeaker announces that from now on all points will be
scored in the negative. From here they may also witness
a young woman who, instead of being disbursed moneys
from a change belt, is politely asked to pay the agents.
Neighboring players help her out, she dutifully counts
quarters and nickels in the agent's outstretched hand.
90 minutes within the performance, players
are in various stages, occupying various positions in the
space. Some are trying to renegotiate for their ID's at the
registration table; some are on the grid, some are cueing
at the accounting or evaluation tables and others are in the
pending area. Some seem bored, others intensely excited,
some laughing and others distinctly upset. The auction next
is well under way, some players are missing the best deals
and begin to protest loudly. The police have been called.
At a prerecorded cue, all agents gradually and
unremarkably leave the exhibition space and gather at the
registration desk. For the next 10-12 minutes, nothing else
changes in the now unsupervised space: the recorded voice
in the loudspeakers continues to loop through instructions,
players remain cueing in front of empty accounting and
valuation tables, stranded in the grid, hands raised in
appeal to agents that do not arrive; waiting corralled in the
pending area. We are unsure how long it takes players to
realize the system has abandoned them, if any are raiding
the tables for more points or stacks of quarters, if they are
alarmed or indifferent, socializing or becoming agitated.
What we do know is that it takes 12 minutes before the
first players arrive at the Museum entrance looking for
answers. They are thanked for their cooperation, ID's are
returned, and informal conversations about this evening's
performance begin.
Playing Fields
Ten months later, I presented the project and workshop
method at a conference in Cardiff, Wales entitled
Displacement and Integration. I proposed this method as
a possible model for critical pedagogy in the context of
working with refugees and asylum seekers. This was also
intended as a critical alternative to the spatial trope of
displacement/integration (expulsion/incorporation, outside/
inside and so forth).
The debates surrounding these workshops echoed
the conversations at the end of the Nickle performance.
Art professionals (theater practitioners, community artists)
were generally appalled at the suggestion of 'real' (as
opposed to purely symbolic) coercion, and at what they
considered grossly unethical assumptions made about the
players. Some insisted that game itself, designed with the
participation of asylum seekers, was sufficient, and did not
require a second stage - in which the game would be played
by unsuspecting museum patrons. Others suggested a more
ethical social contract was necessary, notifying possible
participants of the nature of the game ahead of time, and
giving reluctant visitors the choice to participate purely as
CO
o
03
O
>>
CD
spectators. Several social workers, trauma counselors and
immigration rights activists, however, saw potential in the
method, and strongly supported a structure which would
provoke the renegotiation of established positions of power.
This work, and the debate surrounding it, point to
the necessity and limits of intervention within the frame of
the museum, particularly when attempting to de-normalize
the construction of the local' or "citizen" subject position
in relation to the 'foreigner', the 'spectator' in relation to
'performer'. 'The Elastic Test' project developed over three
stages, in three different locations - Johannesburg, South
Africa; Houston United States; and Calgary Canada, and
in each stage required making something of a mess within
established social and/or institutional structures. But this
is not really sustainable as a practice for very long - not,
for instance, for the curator who lost his job within days of
the exhibition, nor for the artists who have not been invited
back to Canada since. There are specific ways of playing
the bad boy as an artist which are rewarded with increased
visibility in the art market; this is not one of them. But we
are left with something concrete we can continue to work
with: the strategic leveraging of our capacity for play as a
complex spatial/social practice, linking movement with the
awareness of oneself in relation to others, within multiple
spatial/social frames. The players' relational adaptations
within contradictory and unstable systems of valuation is
what brings the playing field itself into question.
P LAY BAC K
25
P LAY FORWA R D
References
Harvey, David. 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards
a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. London and
New York: Verso
Holmes, Brian. The Artistic Device, Or the Articulation
of Collective Speech. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in
Organization Volume 6(4), November 2006. Also available
online on Brian Holmes' web archive at www.u-tangente.org
Kester, Grant. Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework
for Littoral Art. Variant issue 9. Winter 1999-2000. Glasgow.
Also published online at http://www.variant.randomstate.
org/9texts/KesterSupplement.html
Thatcher, Margaret . Interview with Ronald Butt. Sunday
Times, 3 May 1981. Available online at http://www.
margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.
asp?docid=104475
United States Immigration and Nationality Act.
Interpretations. Interpretation 316.1 Naturalization
requirements. All statutes and interpretations available on
the US Citizenship and Immigration Services website http://
www.uscis.gov/propub/ProPubVARjsp?dockey=dc0174da927
200b24200dc98f2a0dd3d
1 Interview with Margaret Thatcher in the Sunday
Times, May 3 1981. Also quoted by David Harvey in
Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven
Geographical Development, whose spatial analysis of
neoliberalism I am greatly indebted to
2 I am borrowing heavily from recent debates
surrounding Littoral Practice, especially Grant Kester's
formulations; see "Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical
Framework For Littoral Art" in Introduction: Socially Engaged
Practice Forum; though wary of naming such practices as a
possibly defensive maneuver (what's wrong with a complete
departure from identification as "art"?), I find many aspects
of these debates useful.
3 United States Immigration and Nationality Act,
Interpretation 316.1. US Immigration Statutes had remained
virtually unchanged since their inception; however, the
ever-changing Interpretations reflect the ways in which
naturalization criteria are interpreted by the courts. The
Elastic Text Project began in the US and then developed in
South Africa and Canada
4 I am greatly indebted to the work of Brian Holmes,
in particular his exploration of the counter-device in "The
Artistic Device, Or the Articulation of Collective Speech"
5 Documentation can be viewed at www.elastictest.com
6 United States Immigration and Nationality Act,
Interpretation 316.1
7 Due to the nature of the process, participants'
contributions are crucial in shaping the project. Agents
include workshop participants and performance artists
from the MS2 festival. Full credits available at http://www.
elastictest.com/cangallery/canpicsl.html
Rozalinda Borcila is a Romanian artist currently
based in the US. Her video, installation and
performance work attends to the material spaces of
power, and its subjective experience in daily life.
She is also involved in several collaborations,
seeking ways to develop collective capacities for
critical imagination and action, www.borcila.com
www. commonplacesproject. org www. elastictest. com
o
o
CO
H — '
o
CD
Q_
CD
O
d
03
O
INDUSTRIALTOWNFU -
TURISM: THE RETURN OF
MESHWORK(l) MARKETS
Neil Cummings
Amended transcript of a lecture delivered to the Network of
Market Traders, Cracow middle-europe June 12th 2038
Its great to be with you as part of your Centenary Celebra-
tions here in Nowa Huta-
And thanks to the organizers Jakub Szreder and Martin Kalt-
waser for inviting me to participate.
Looking back, it was the collapse of the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) trade talks in 2006, that was the
beginning of the end of a competitive global market. After five
years of intense negotiation developing countries were out-
raged at the way in which the interests of Europe, Japan and
the US were being used to intimidate them into singing up to
a viciously unfair, new round of 'Free Trade' agreements. The
competitive Global marketplace (The Market) exploited the
poorest people and expropriated their resources, while GATT's
enforcement arm the Multinational Trade Organization (MTO)
- known colloquially as the Free Trade Police (FTP) - enforced
its agreements with extensive global powers and brutal trade
sanctions. Most sub-Saharan African Trade ministers walked
out in disgust, citing the coupling of a 'development agenda'
to the opening of their local markets to the competitive global
'Free Trade" market, as simply corrupt (2) .
In theory the World Trade Organization (WTO) through GATT
was supposed to prevent protectionism - the manipulation
of financial prices through import tariffs and reproduction
subsidies (3) - in The Market by the rich trading nations,
while granting a degree of protectionism to developing na-
tions markets (4). The principle makes sense, The Market had
vast capital, power, experience and economies of scale, so
to let The Market compete with small local markets was not
competition, it was like learning to swim in a flood, and local
markets drowned. Yet the ideological drive of The Market's
advocates could not tolerate even limited protectionism, and
so the last great global trade negotiations collapsed. It was
becoming obvious, that for all its rhetoric The Market did not
transfer, distribute or even circulate wealth; it concentrate
power in monopolies.
Mr 5 :
For instance, in 2006 the merger of Acelor and Mittal Steel
into Acelor-Mittal produced the world's largest global steel
company, with annual shipments of 75.2 million tons and
revenues of over 38.6 billion US dollars. They owned steel-
making facilities in 46 countries, spanning four continents an
employed 500,000 people. Acelor-Mittal Steel consolidated
(read monopolized) the world steel industry through a range
of acquisitions, many through purchasing formerly public
sector-owned companies. And I'm sure that you are all only
too well aware, that they once owned the Heritage Steelworks
near to where I'm speaking to you from today. Nowa Huta was
one of only two Soviet (Soviet used to mean state dominated
anti-market economies) 'ideal cities' ever to be constructed,
and it was built around the gargantuan 'Lenin' steelworks.
Which, after the introduction of The Market and the move
out of public ownership, became the Sendzimira steelworks.
Acquired by the Mittal group in 2004, steelmaking ceased in
2010 and production moved to Rangoon to be closer to Chi-
26
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
nese and Indian demand. Although the Steelworks re-opened
in 2014 as a part of Nowa Huta's re-branding as an 'event'
city, and it became a UNESCO protected 'communist' World
Heritage site in 2016 with former steelworkers performing
surrogate labour for visiting tourists.
In many ways, it's the revitalization of this redundancy by
our meshwork - and Now Huta is almost a micro-model of
global trends, it could equally well be applied to Nanjin or
Wolfsburg, or Lucknow - that we are celebrating today.
Although perhaps the clearest example of the powerful mo-
nopolizing forces at work in The Market, was the extraordi-
nary financial profit generated through deregulated trading in
the momentary price differences between various currencies.
Currency trading enabled billions of US dollars of financial
speculation to roam the globe looking for competitive advan-
tage. Released from the post World War II, Bretton-Woods (5)
agreement in 1971, and devolved of national political man-
agement during the unprecedented ' free market' ideology
of the 1980's, financial trading exploded in size, ubiquity
and liquidity. The scale of financial trading was truly stagger-
ing. For example the turnover in the currency market alone
was estimated at 2.4 trillion US dollars a day in April 2008
(6), which meant that in two months the financial profit from
traded currency dwarfed the annual financial turnover from
manufacturing and retail of the entire planet. That's more
financial profit in two months than that generated from the
production and consumption of every material thing on the
planet in a year. And currency trading was but one of the
five principle 'money' markets, the other four being bonds,
stock, derivatives and commodities. Its worth me reminding
you that %75 of currency trading was dominated by five bro-
kerage firms (7).
It was in a mid-nineteenth century nation called England, a
satellite of Old Europe, that the social experiment to emanci-
pate economic life, The Market, from social and political con-
sequence began. In a city called Manchester, they pioneered
a new form of social exchange they named the 'Free' Market,
it was an economy - of money, labour, material and proc-
esses - from which financial profit could be generated without
regard to its wider effects on society and its resources. It's
the origins for what used to be called the 'global' economy,
a worldwide 'free' market dominated by trading monopolies.
In this Market, the varied experiences, languages, exchange
practices, and the manifold economic systems of all cultures
were to be superseded by a new, universal community found-
ed on the logic of financial competition. It was the last great
Enlightenment project.
Prior to this, rather like today, economic exchange practices
were conducted in cooperative social markets — markets that
were embedded in a community, and sensitive to environ-
mental resources. These cooperative markets encouraged so-
cial cohesion, they operated within a wider calculation as to
what constitutes a profit and loss; they functioned more like
ecologies. The goal of the Free Market experiment, delivered
through a raft of the transnational organizations - of which
GATT was the most powerful- was to eradicate these coop-
erative social markets. And for almost two hundred years the
US-Japan-European vision of the global, homogenous, com-
petitive, 'free' Market dominated world-wide exchange.
No one would want to deny The Markets role in the develop-
ment of legal and economic instruments - like the mortgag-
ing of assets- that perfected aspects of competitive trade.
And no one would want to deny the benefits competitive mar-
kets can bring in the development and delivery of certain
goods and services. The ideological mistake was to see The
Market as a universal technology, and, consequently to recon-
figure the whole world ecology as its plaything.
To imagine the world as a Market was to invite our own aliena-
tion from it.
Ultimately the clash of ideologies that GATT intended to man-
age, managed itself. Ideological faith in The Market as a force
for good, enabling billions of people to escape poverty, bring
social harmony and provide the best use scarce resources
was exposed as an abject failure. The Market was not a pas-
sive medium, it was actually responsible for the widening gulf
between the minority that manipulated its effects, and the
majority that were subject to its force.
Its hard to comprehend now, but the competitive Market ma-
nipulated by trading monopolies - under the illusion of com-
petition - forced nations and their citizens into destructive an-
tagonism. Mega-corporations shaped peoples lives from the
cradle to the grave by providing employment, goods, services,
entertainments and ideologies; they controlled peoples wag-
es, expenditures, savings, debts, pensions and investments
(8). These corporations could develop or destroy whole com-
munities by closing energy repurposing plants, steelworks or
manufactories and move production elsewhere. And in their
place encourage low wage outlets, service centers, heritage
sites, tourist destinations and 'event' cities (9). Again, Nowa
Huta is a perfect example.
World-wide, citizens had to be protected from the power of
the mega-corporations that manipulated The Market. A vast
Human Rights coalition formed under the ethos of the 'Multi-
tude', composed of the remnants of the United Nations and
the more recent founded World Development Organization,
Consumer and Employment Rights agencies, environmental-
ists, local market makers and grass roots activists. Citizens
had to be protected from financial audit failures, fraud and
criminality of mega-corporations, their pathological avoid-
ance of tax continually drained money from the public purse;
through their funding of think tanks, lobbyists and political
parties they shaped public policy to maximize their interests
at national and international level; they incited cultural and
religious terrorism (and terrorism devastated the trust neces-
sary to facilitate Market activity) through ideological homo-
geneity; they destroyed social welfare projects (where they
existed) such as health care for all, state pension schemes,
reliable public services (like water, electricity, transport and
communication) and free state funded education; they ruth-
lessly expropriated natural resources through plundering the
worlds energy and mineral wealth, while through the 'tipping
effect' of global warming and the failure of carbon trading,
simultaneously polluted vast tracts of the globe. We needed
protection because, quite simply, The Market was killing us.
The single financial economy was also a monoglotal language
environment (a variant of US English), and a global disease
pool; a disease pool seething with Creutzfeldt-Jakobson dis-
ease, myriad 'product' triggered carcinogens and pandemic
immune system failures (the 'escaped' genetic hybrid of avian
flu being one, and the modified HIV/aids virus another) and
of course chronic 'consumer' obesity. Their complete lack of
social responsibility made The Market a liability to world sus-
tainability; simply, their financial profits were societies loss,
and this was a cost we could no longer afford to bare.
Of course these world-wide public 'protections' - like equality
of employment, of health and safety conventions, or minimum
wages, or consumer and environmental protection - were al-
ways portrayed as 'regulation' stifling the dynamic Market,
and posing a threat to creativity, profitability and efficiency.
Immaterial 'property' and The Market
The late 20th century drive to expropriate ideas, creativity
and innovation by The Market, under the sign of property was
in many ways the straw that broke the camels back. It seems
obvious now, but The Markets continual impingement on cru-
cial humanitarian issues, for instance the impact on scientific
and cultural innovation, grew so stifling that it became an eth-
ical imperative to break the replicating copyright, patent and
the emerging Intellectual Property (IP) regimes. It was these
legal regimes and their enforcement that supported The Mar-
kets dominance, with their collapse - and the concomitant
failure of trust necessary for exchange (I'll say more about
this later) - The Market began to fracture into the myriad local
meshworks that we might begin to recognize today.
Knowledge 'belongs to', or more properly 'can be claimed
by' communities near and far: the near one of its producers
- local enthusiasts, embedded practical know-how, practices
of everyday life, networks of academics, etc - and the far
one of a universal beneficiary; humankind (10). Similarly cul-
tural products, like artworks 'belong' to a near community of
enthusiasts, artists, art critics, curators and collectors, etc,
that make up the local arworlds, and a far community we
refer to as culture, or world heritage. And we could imagina-
tively model plant, animal, and mineral resources in a similar
way, and of course exchange practices too. How is it possible
therefore, to have exclusive rights over resources that are al-
ready shared by all? Knowledge, artworks, life-practices, natu-
ral resources, and much else besides, are all able to exist as
nonexclusive distributable resources, outside of regimes of
Marketization. Diverse strategies of cultural production, with-
in and across specific cultural contexts, between individuals
and across assemblages of interests cannot be forced into a
simple model of property and Market. As Ishmael observes
in Herman Melville's Moby Dick " It's a mutual, joint stock
world" (11).
The former Patents law for example granted monopolies of
use to the patent holder for 70 years. And these patents could
be applied for, and enforced, on any modified plant, mineral
and animal modification, or the process that lead to the mod-
ification (12)! The monopoly was justified by the Pharma-gi-
ants, because of the high financial cost of research and de-
velopment, and the need to recoup their financial investment.
The prices set by the Pharma-giants, in The Market, for their
branded products excluded many citizens of the developing
nations (13). And so to provide for poorer people, generic
products were reverse engineered by local producers from
branded pharmaceuticals and traded in cooperative markets.
Concerned by the loss of revenue and breach of Patent pro-
tection, the Pharma-giants lobbied the Uruguay round of the
WTO talks(1986-94), to frame new legislation to protect their
'intellectual property'. The notorious Trade Related Aspects
of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement was the result.
TRIPS required all WTO member nations to bring their pat-
ent, copyright and intellectual property regimes into align-
ment with The Market and its manipulators interests. Essen-
tially to close local generic markets and vigorously prosecute
intellectual 'pirates'. TRIPS was an all embracing agreement,
including all genetic materials, plants, micro-organisms and
organisms and their DNA sequences, material processes,
technologies, all compiled information, all expressions of
knowledge, and every image, text, and sound sequence. From
this moment on, there seemed no end to the plethora of new
immanent or immaterial entities, subject to claims and re-
strictions based on ownership rights. It was as if the only
legitimate relationship between persons or corporations and
the world, were those constituted as property. And constitut-
ing the world as property suggests a specific reification (turn-
ing a thing into an object), where the objectified possession
- and an objectified possession is an artifact perfected for
trade - becomes the only value recognized as having value; a
marketable value.
The date set for full TRIPS compliancy was 2016. Fortunately
mass cooperative 'piratization', supported by the Multitudes
Public Interest legislation overrode the desire of The Market.
TRIPS collapsed well before its implementation date. Medi-
cal discoveries, treatments and drugs were some of the first
'properties' to be freed from The Market. Pharma-giants
were banned from being able to profit from the life and death
of their 'customers' and their expropriated IP was returned
to the 'near' and 'far' communities, where it 'belonged'. Ma-
terial and immaterial knowledge, as well as creative expres-
sions quickly followed. Knowledge and creativity ceased to
be commodities for trade in the Market, and were returned
to humankind as recognizably, the very source of life itself,
a basic need and a human right. And as we know, far from
stifling innovation and creativity, the collapse of IP regimes
encouraged a golden age of science, technology and culture.
Constant collaborative development, the free movement of
knowledge and creativity resulted in many of the treatments,
practices and technologies that have become our everyday.
27
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
I should just remind you, because now it's so ubiquitous we
tend to take it for granted, that the inspiration for IP resistance
was the simultaneous development of Free Software and the
Free Culture movement. It was the early software movement
that produced the GNU/Linux, operating system; because for
the twenty years before GNU/Linux, there were competing
operating systems, all incompatible, and all privately owned.
Eventually GNU/Linux ran the 'backbone' infrastructure for
version 2 of the WWW, and it erased proprietary OS systems
when information-devices became thoroughly embedded
and distributed. The necessary Open Content licenses that
developed to protect software from IP regimes also enabled
Open Knowledge, Commons-based and Free Culture practices
to take-hold. If the Free Software movement challenged con-
ventional practices of authorship, ownership and distribution
with user-driven innovation, peer-to-peer and non-proprietary
(meaning non - Market) models of cultural production, these
innovative practices quickly spread to art, visual culture and
cultural production in general. Eventually, large-scale coop-
erative efforts— peer production of information, knowledge,
and culture encouraged fifty million volunteers to success-
fully coauthor, maintain and use Wikipedia, (then) the larg-
est alternative to proprietary encyclopaedic knowledge. And
4.5 million volunteers contribute their networked computer
downtime to create the most powerful supercomputer on
Earth, SETI (14). Of course the story from then on is fairly
well known, educational practices were slowly transformed
by commons-knowledge projects, sciences returned to peer
sharing and public review, and so on, through news reporting
and distribution, then entertainment ceased being something
you consumed and returned to a participant practice, and fi-
nally local 'open source' democratic organizations joined the
recombinant 'Multitude' to refresh political engagement. The
experience of participation in everyday life, its organization,
representation and communication, was being re-appropriat-
ed from The Market by the people who produced it.
The Return of Meshwork Markets
An ecology is not controlled by a genetic program - like a spe-
cies - it integrates a variety of animals and plants, food and
energy into a web of related interests, interlocking them as
a network. The result, a decentralized assemblage of hetero-
geneous components closely mirrors the dynamics of our co-
operative local (and true) market. Cooperative markets allow
the interaction of people, animals, plants, goods, products,
knowledge, resources, energy and waste to be interlocked
by complementary interests. These markets are sustainable,
self-organized and decentralized structures: they arise spon-
taneously without the need for central planning, and evolve
through a kind of creative drift, through following the conver-
gence of resources, needs and desire. Cooperative markets
are based on mutuality. They operate
agonistically, meaning that the aim of participants is not to
destroy one another (antagonism), but like wrestlers wres-
tling, recognize the reciprocity necessary in any exchange.
As we have seen, the logic of competitive practice in The
Market is to accrue the power to 'set' the financial price of
inputs and outputs. 'Inputs' would be the materials, labour
and process of production, 'outputs' the means of distribu-
tion and point of demand. Mega-corporations, monopolies
(in all but name) and oligopolies are price setters: the finan-
cial cost of their processes has never reflected the rhetoric
they use in describing The Market - the rhetoric of supply
dynamics, user demand, social costs or environmental conse-
quences. Financial prices are 'set' at a level that reflects their
own power to control market share and maximize financial
profit (15).
In absolute contrast in our local collaborative markets, eve-
rybody involved recognizes themselves as simultaneously, a
producer, distributor and end-user. And everybody recognizes
the codependency of those practices, and how those prac-
tices sit within wider social and 'natural' resources; a network
of interests, an ecology. Networks of networked interests,
convened as markets, we learnt to call meshworks. And in
meshwork markets, monopolization looses its logic. The best
financial price is no longer that which is set by monopolies to
maximizes the difference between cost of production, distri-
bution, and the price paid by the end-user - what used to be
called, in a rather patronizing term, the consumer. Now, the
'best' financial price is that which reflects the co-dependency
of the network of networked interests that make our markets.
Meshwork markets therefore, transform financial competition
into financial cooperation.
And perhaps as importantly, local meshworks create a grow-
ing pool of embedded practical knowledge. And because
this pool has not been internalized as a property by a mega-
corporation, it cannot be expropriated, and so knowledge
remains and enriches its locale. Hence regional, local coop-
erative markets will not suffer the fate of so many Industrial
company towns - like Nowa Huta, or Nanjin or Wolfsburg,
or Lucknow - which die after the mega-corporation that feed
upon them, move elsewhere (16).
"Exchange", wrote sociologist Georg Simmel in 1907 is "one
of the purest and most primitive forms of human socializa-
tion; it creates a society, in place of a mere collection of in-
dividuals." (17)
As I mentioned earlier, a market is not designed, and yet there
is a recognizable coherence between the ancient bazzar (18),
the 19th C Marche au Puce, the 20th C flea, thrift and street
markets, peer-to-peer digital exchanges, and contemporary
meshworks. We might recognize elements of this description
of a late 20th C European flea market
7/7 Brick Lane, as in markets everywhere, an adjacency of
products evolves. Stolen bicycles for instance, their various
parts and sub parts - and the feral youth that traffic them - ac-
crue to one another near the edges of the market, where lines
of vision and routes of escape are relatively accessible. Sto-
len goods, counterfeit perfumes, and pick-a cup touts, share
these easy-access border zones with milling groups of Alba-
nians offering crumpled packets, while muttering "cigarettes,
cigarettes, cigarettes". Further in, out of date-stamp comes-
tibles, food without provenance, bizarrely named sweets,
piles of rotting or misshapen vegetables, damaged delicacies
and mountains of cakes, stick together in a sick parody of
the supermarket aisle. A milling crowd of men browse stalls
piled with new and old tools, and tools for tasks long forgot-
ten, so long forgotten the implements take on the patina of
museum artifacts from cultures long deceased. Household
goods merge with an array of furniture - from broken rubbish
to high-design collectibles, are all washed-up on the market
from capsized businesses and sinking domestic arrange-
ments. Pirated software, games and pornography, compete
with carelessly copied DVD's ■ their presence in the market
so premature, they precede the official product release ■ cell
phones, sim cards and 'instant unblocking' (a guy with a lap-
top) merge into piles of 'remotes', black goods and TV's, to
form a recycled silicon valley. '
That was an extract from a book about London, Old Europe
called Downriver, by Ian Sinclair published in 1991.
Cooperative markets are networks of interrelated interests,
and interrelated interests can only function (obviously) in use-
ful combination with others. Markets therefore -as Simmel
so perceptively observed - are social mechanism that enable
people to swap, trade, bargain, compete and cooperate. It
enables them to transact complex resources, needs and de-
sires, through a medium of exchange. Which makes exchange,
first and foremost a communication praxis; and a market a
communications technology. Peoples come together to trans-
act, perhaps for quite different reasons; they do not need to
exchange equitably, or even communicate in the same lan-
guage; all that is required is that they have some 'goods (19)'
to transact, and social conventions to enable the transaction
- a cooperative market.
That the values attached to 'goods' in a given transaction, are
not the values received is unimportant, transactions are pos-
sible without equivalence. Because of course, the possibility
of two desires finding their exact reciprocal equivalent in an
endless chain of transaction is an impossibility; barter there-
fore has always been a severely limited social practice. Money,
or some other agreed currency has always been useful for de-
ferring the differences exposed in transaction. Money offsets
the need for transactual reciprocity. It mutates the simple
chain of barter into a network, no a network of networks, a
meshwork of exchange through space and time. Money con-
nects transactions to all other desires, everywhere.
Transactions are also clearly possible without ownership. All
that is necessary - like the foundation of language itself - is
that one value can be substituted for another, and that in-
terested parties can apprehend the substitution. Therefore
when 'goods' are transacted, relations between people are
also exchanged. Values, values of all kinds - including cultur-
al, political, emotional, libidinal and financial - can be made
present, substituted and transacted. A transaction is not tied
to the goods transacted, it's the ability to make present or
real, relationships between people. Social relations as subtle
and complex as this; convened in meshwork markets, can
never be subsumed by The Market.
Although a market is not designed as an aesthetic object,
there is a beautiful logic of practice at work: (as we have seen
already) markets are self-regulating networks that evolve a
familiar structure from heterogenous desires. And yet those
desires are never 'set' - 'set' in the old Market sense of the
tern, meaning fixed or controlled. In cooperative markets de-
sires are always in the process of becoming. Transactions
confer temporal assessments of value that continually have
to be remade. Meshwork markets function in the moment of
transaction.
Forgive me for my indulgence, I'm sure I don't need to lec-
ture the audience here this evening of the workings of a mar-
ket
I'm sure you're anxious to continue the celebrations. So in
closing, I would just like to loop back with you, almost to the
birth of your organization in 1939 and wander with (the then)
two famous artists through the vast 'marche au puces' of cen-
tral Paris, a former capital in Old Europe. Imagine those radi-
cal 'surrealists' artist Andre Breton and Alberto Giacommetti
as they scoured the markets looking for 'object sauvages'
(20). Object sauvages' is an Old French language term mean-
ing 'savage object', by which they meant to designate objects
that were stripped of the aesthetic glamour of advertising.
Things that had fallen from The Market, abandoned by the
dead logic of retail, and plunged into the world of need and
desire. The surrealist artists sought-out objects, that would
enable them, in the moment of transaction, to decode their
unconscious and libidinal desires. For them, street markets
were like vast material maps of the collective unconscious, a
28
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
psycho-pathology of everyday life and a reservoir of all that is
lost in the banality of shopping, and The Market.
Breton, and the Surreallist instinctively understood, as we do
a hundred years later, that transactions convened in coopera-
tive meshwork markets are a celebration of 'real' life.
Even more than that, such market transactions don't result in
our alienation from life; they are the foundation of life itself.
Archaic yet hyper-modern (as we all know only too well) coop-
erative markets endure, and life prospers.
Thank you for being so patient,
Thank you so much for inviting me, goodnight, and enjoy the
celebrations.
Image credits and captions
1. MM_pavilion.jpg
Network of Market Traders local pavilion, Nowa Huta 2024
2. MM_Hongkong.jpg
Installing the Open Knowledge Network T5 spine, Berliner
Ring, Wolfsburg 2036
3. MM_market.jpg
Local produce at one of the fledgling local markets, Nowa
Huta 2004
All images courtesy of chanceprojects.com
commissioned by Jakub Szreder and Martin Kaltwaser
as part of 100 years of Wolfsburg and Nowa Huta 10 Dec
2005 - 14 Nov 2006 Kunstverein Wolfsburg - Lazia Nowej Thea-
tre Nowa Huta, Cracow
Footnotes
(1) 'Meshworks' was a term coined by a 20th century cultural
theorist Manuel De Landa in book entitled A Thousand Years of
Non-Linear History Zone Books New York 2000
(2) In West Africa in 2006, in some of the poorest countries on
the planet - Mali, Liberia, Gabon and Burkina Faso - the annual
debt repayments (repayments negotiated by Non Government
Organizations NGO's on their behalf on debts for loans en-
forced on them by the World Trade Organization WTO) exceed
the countries total Gross National Product GNP; the total mar-
ketization of the nations tradeable excess.
The World Bank will only deal with - meaning extend loans
to; or en-debt - countries without trade protections, therefore
Tree' markets.
(3) In 2004 the United States spent $4 billion dollars per an-
num subsidizing its 25,000 cotton farmers, more than the en-
tire economic output of Burkina Faso. The subsidies exceeded
the value of the cotton produced, lead to overproduction and
distorted the prices in the market. Subsidies stifle local mar-
kets, and deprive developing markets of the only advantage
they have, low costs and high quality.
(4) One of the many cruel ironies is that no market was ever
'free'. As a form of exchange between interested parties mar-
kets are always convened through convention, rule and restric-
tion.
(5) The Bretton Woods system of international economic man-
agement established the rules for commercial and financial
relations among the major industrial states in July 1944. The
agreement anchored national currencies to the US dollar,
linked the value of the dollar to the price of gold thereby fa-
cilitating the first truly global market, http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Bretton_Woods_Conference
(6) The Wall Street Journal Europe, (2/9/08 p. 20).
(7) Wall Street Journal Europe ibid
(8) Personal debt in Europe broke through the 2 trillion
(2,000,000,000,000) barrier in 2010 and was increasing by
£1 million every four minutes; the interest paid on this debt
was running at £8 billion every month. http://www.creditac-
tion.org.uk/debtstats.htm
(9) To paraphrase the 17th C English philosopher Thomas
Hobbes in place of simultaneous war between all men, there
was competitive trade between all men. Hobbes, Thomas The
Leviathan (1651) http://www.thomas-hobbes.com/works/le-
viathan/
(10) Free access to knowledge and information (article 34)
was added to the amended Universal Declaration of Human
Rights in 2010. Adopted and proclaimed by General Assembly
resolution 217 A (III) of 10 December 2010
(11) Melville, Herman Moby Dick, Collectors Library edition
2004(1851) p. 108
http://www.bibliomania.com
(12) The Indian Neem tree (Azadirachta indica), used for cen-
turies by local people to produce remedies for everything from
snake bites to high blood pressure was in 2004 the subject
of 70 patents by Pharma-giants. In an extraordinary grab for
resources companies claimed ownership of maize, potato,
basmati rice, wheat sorghum, and all vegetables. Patents were
also granted on tea, soya, coffee and cotton. The struggle in
the early years of our century was over the ownership of life
forms, and their reproduction. By 2012 all property claims on
life processes were overthrown, although the developing world
spent over 60bn US dollars a year fighting the new Inventions',
processes and products of the pharma giants and their result-
ant intellectual property claims.
(13) For example in May 2003, branded Zidovidune capsules,
used in early HIV/Aid's treatments (before its cluster muta-
tion), cost 198 OE euros, generics 24 OE euros, (prices re-
corded by Medecins Sans Frontieres)
(14) It was the SETI project that processed the gene sequenc-
ing necessary for the fist i-commons databank in 2013
(15) The top ten monopolies in 2008, Citigroup, General Elec-
tric, Altria Group, Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Bank of
America, Pfizzer, Wal-Mart Stores, Toyota, Microsoft
(16) Wolfsburg is a perfect example, the town was founded
in 1939 around the Wolkswagen corporation car factory. The
city and corporation prospered for sixty years until production
was moved to cheaper zones in The Market, oil droughts ren-
dered cars luxurious, and eventually the brand was absorbed
by a Market rival in 2007. The city during this period perpetu-
ated a fiction that the car corporation was still supporting the
town - in fact it was principally derivative trading by the parent
company, and perpetuated a series of auto themed projects
to compete the fiction. Includiing Auto Stadt -a theme park
for car and car fetishism, the Phaeno a destination museum
a transpart
(17) Simmel, Georg The Philosophy of Money Routledge Lon-
don 2010(1907)
(18) A bazaar is an ancient word for a market, the word de-
rives from the Persian bazar, whose etymology goes back to
the Pahlavi word baha-char meaning "the place of value".
(19) By using the unfashionable term 'goods' I'd like to signify
anything that can be transacted; material or immaterial.
(29) The incident is retold in Andre Breton's book Nadja (1939)
http://www.site-magister.com/nadja.htm
Creative Commons: Attribution ShareAlike v2.5
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
29
WHAT ARE THE CREATIVE
INDUSTRIES
An analysis of organization, epistemol-
ogy, policy and discourse
from the UK mid- 2007
Manuela Zechner
0. Introduction
Key points+ methodology
Background
1. Culture and Industry
The Culture Industry
"Culture"
Cultural Industries and Creative Industries
2. Creative Industries
Definition and Organization
Who are Creative Industries workers and what difference do
they make?
The "Creative Class"
3. Creative Industries policy
Intellectual Property
Cultural Policy
Cultural Policy and Open Source
Cultural Policy and Subsidy
Public- Private Partnerships in Art and Education
4. Discourse
Creativity
Innovation
Talent
5. Conclusion: responding and relating
key words; creative industries, culture industry, cultural in-
dustries, policy, UK, work, flexibilization, precariousness,
public- private partnerships, education, commercialization,
open source, discourse, creativity, innovation, talent
0. Introduction
The Creative Industries are a new and flourishing sector of
advanced capitalist economies 1 , particularly in the UK where
it makes about 7.3% of the economy and is of comparable
size to the financial services industry 2 . An exhaustive report
has just been released by the UK DCMS in anticipation of a
green paper 3 . While the Creative Industries are referred to as
a success story in the UK and elsewhere, there is need for a
more critical reflection on what exactly they are composed of
and structured by, how they stand in relation to cultural policy
and the Cultural Industries, and what they aim to bring to or
take from "culture" and "creativity".
The notion of culture has since after the second world war
been increasingly associated with industry and markets, and
1 In July 2007, the CRI alongside Biotechnology and
Informations and Communications Technology (ICT) are
among the three fastest growing economic sectors globally,
according to the World Bank In the EU they make for 2.6
percent (i.e. Culture industries contribute more towards the
economy in Europe than e.g. the food industries (1.9%) or
the chemical industries (2.3%)) (November 2006). Similar
figures can be put forward for various countries- particularly
South Korea, Australia, the US, Singapore, etc). The CI
are estimated to account for 7 percent of world GDR
http://wwwl.worldbank.org/devoutreach/nov03/article.
asp?id=221
2 Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Staying
ahead, (Introduction), Report on Creative Industries,
London June 2007. http://headshift.com/dcms/index.
cfm?fuseaction=main.viewBlogEntry&intMTEntrylD=3095
visited September 2007
3 World Bank website, ibid
since the 70s along with notions of knowledge and creativity
increasingly associated with the monetary and enterprise. As
part of a host of notions that have arisen in the course of
complex developments of correlations between culture and
economic sectors, the concept of creativity has come to play
an important role in the vocabularies of government and
business, particularly in the UK and France since the mid-80s.
The arising discourses are increasingly under investigation by
academics as well as cultural workers in critical, subversive
or affirmative manner.
The accelerating growth of what came to be known as the
knowledge economy in the nineties furthered the emergence
of new kinds of policy and discourse around what one might
call "culture". Ways of relating to this notion had been
undergoing constant transformation since the early 20 th
century, when continually changing conditions of production
impacted on practices and markets associated with "culture".
Since the nineties, the emergence of a discourse surrounding
Creative Industries appears most notable in France and the
UK, contributing the formation of a highly neoliberal idea of
cultural production and the legitimation of corresponding
policy. The formation of what I would call an emerging regime
of Creative I ndustries bears correspondence to the notions and
policy of Cultural Industries as well as the concept of Culture
Industry as coined by Horkheimer and Adorno 4 , however
it does not entirely coincide with either. The emergence of
Creative Industries is being rigorously implemented on a
policy level.
Ever- increasing investment in what I will generally refer
to as semantic, symbolic or cultural production and the
marketing thereof as copyrighted material forms the basis of
the prospering Creative Industries. The policy and according
investment in this sector not only affects those whose activities
happen to coincide with this relatively new definition of a
field, but encompasses various developments that impact
on society at large. The highly economy-oriented assignment
of value and meaning to cultural phenomena gives rise to
policies that encourage processes of gentrification in urban
zones, systematic education of flexible creative workers
as well as supporting a general shift towards a proprietary
model for ideas.
Creative Industries is a hybrid strategy for the extraction
of financial profit mainly from "immaterial" labour, cultural
services and experiences, but also hardware production
and sales. With increasing deregulation, the rewarding of
intellectual and creative activity becomes more difficult,
because there is a new organization of labour within which
fixed or stable working hours and contracts no longer hold.
The quantification of knowledge or creativity in economic
terms on the other hand is achieved through the application
of Intellectual Property (henceforth IP) regulations. Creative
labour as such is highly competitive, despite depending on
peer review and supposedly collaborative team work 5 .
While symbolic production becomes ever more important
for national and supranational economies, there exist many
different ways of developing and sustaining a wealth of related
activity and production within regions and states. This text will
focus on the history, policy and contemporary government
Creative Industries (henceforth CRI) discourse in the UK, while
also referring to European and Brazilian contexts. It seems
particularly relev ant to refer to the CRI in the UK because,
4 The term "Cultural Industry" is often used
synonymously to "Creative Industries". I would argue that
the latter is a new phenomenon that might be understood in
terms of an increased deregulation of cultural production
and to some extent as overwriting the former. "Culture
Industry" in singular describes the conceptualization and
critique of early/mid 20 th century phenomena as described
by T.W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer.
5 If "collaboration" is understood as a non-
hierarchical mode of working together which takes space
to be critical of itself, it is clear that only a very small
margin of cultural or creative industries work can be called
collaborative. Through enforced competition and pressure,
the contrary is likely to occur- a hierarchical organization
of labour which is however based on an ethos of teamwork.
This in one of many factors that makes it difficult to claim
ones rights as a creative worker.
since the 70s its role has been pivotal in developing a host of
urban and national policies that propose new approaches to
merging culture and business. In recent years CRI policy has
become a priority for the UK government, which aims to be
at the forefront of a new culture and prosperity brought by
creative enterprise. 6 The UK CRI are often cited as a model
that informs policy in many other nations.
The CRI conceptual, strategic and legal framework goes
beyond the means of distribution and reception that the
Frankfurt School described as mass media or Culture
Industry, but it can be seen to be part, offshoot or successor
of Cultural Industries Policy. Like most Cultural Industries
(henceforth CUI) frameworks (which mainly come out of the
postwar US and 70s UNESCO policy) the CRI include a vast
range of sectors such as arts, antiques, computer games,
fashion, design, and publishing- encompassing almost any
creative individual, business or arts organisation. In the
UK, where the notion of Creative Industries appears more
frequently than that of Cultural Industries, the CRI are a key
component of cultural policy. Implications of this are both
positive and negative for people working within the culture
sector: an increased number of workplaces and support
for creative enterprise, but also more competitiveness and
flexibilization, as well as commercialization of creative
practice and associated institutions. In the context of cities
such as London, some have argued that the advent of CRI
might mark a shift from investment into management
consultancy and finance towards investment into culture
and creative enterprise 7 . For others it means a desirable
move towards the creation of something like "Ubiquitous
dream societies of icons and aesthetic experience" 8 . For
people living close to cultural/ creative workers it means
processes of gentrification. For the education sector it
means encouragement of creative or project-based learning
in schools while at university level it means an introduction
of "innovation", speculation and venture capitalism. Public-
Private partnerships receive government support particularly
in higher education (for example through HEROBAC, the
HEFCE Higher Education Reach-out to Business and the
Community Fund), where institutions have to commit to the
agenda of producing a business-oriented and individualized
creative workforce accustomed to a logic of Intellectual
Property. Increasingly within Cultural Industries policy,
and most definitely in the Creative Industries regime, the
enforcement Intellectual Property law becomes the basis for
the subsistence of those employed in the CRI.
It is however important to note that the Creative Industries
perhaps is not as planned a field as some of its discourse or
indeed this analysis may suggest. Following the highly complex
and diverse development of Cultural Industries, the Creative
Industries is a field that is being installed in and impacts on
regions and zones in heterogeneous and sometimes hardly
calculated ways. There has been an explosion of terminology
around the economy of culture in the past twenty years
(marked by terms such as Cultural industries', 'creative
industries, 'creative economy', 'experience industries',
'content industries', knowledge industries/entertainment
industries', sunrise industries, future oriented industries,
copyright industries', '(multi) media industries' etc) which
may be taken to indicate just how fast shifts within this
sector occur and how many actors (government, academics,
business, cultural workers) are involved in analyzing and
shaping these discourses and developments.
There is also a t angible impact of CRI policy on the arts,
6 Britain is arguably the world's most creative
nation. The top designers at BMW and Apple are British
and went to British art schools. Britain's music industry is
legendary having produced groups including the Beatles,
Rolling Stones, Oasis amongst many others. -British Council
Creative Industries Core Briefing, http://www.britishcouncil.
org/creative industries core briefing.pdf visited July 2007
7 Barbrook, R. (2004) The Class of the New London:
Mute Publishing Ltd, 2004
8 Dator, J. and Yongseok Seo (2006), Korea as the
wave of a future: The emerging Dream Society of icons and
aesthetic experience http://www.futures.hawaii.edu/dator/
japan/Korea Wave.pdf visited August 2007
30
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
which constitute one of its main component sectors.
Commercialization of aesthetic practice and their institutions
means a decrease in support for small, independent,
politically or experimentally radical projects. It is also
frequently argued that the traditionally precarious status of
most artists becomes transposed to larger populations of
creative workers in the CRI, through an organization of labour
as project-based, flexibilized and highly competitive cluster
activity. While proclaiming a democratization of culture and
creativity via a rhetoric of horizontality and self-realization,
the current expansion of the CRI seems to mark a shift away
from the social towards the economic, producing cultures of
exclusion and precariousness. There is hardly a CRI policy
paper that does not speak of opportunity, however in the light
of cultures of self-exploitation, speculation and bankrupcy
there cannot really be mention of democratization. The vastly
problematic implications of ever- increasing marketisation
of semantic production cause counter- movements to
emerge. These are heterogeneous, sometimes amorphous
and mostly in movement, and often affirm an ethics of open
source, collaboration, critically/ politically/ socially engaged
practice, self-organization/education, piracy, hacking and/or
sustainability.
Key points and methodology
In this text I try to understand the relation of contemporary
CRI discourses to prior and other ways of speaking about
culture and creativity, referring to what I would broadly call
humanist as well as modernist ideas. Initially I will refer
to Felix Guattari for a delineation of different ideas and
values invested in the concept of culture. Subsequently
and throughout the text, I will try to disentangle clusters
of concepts such as Culture Industry/ Cultural Industry/
Creative Industries and creativity/ innovation/ talent as well
as to some extent knowledge/ immaterial/ creative work (I
can only hint to analyses of the latter through reference to
other texts). Much of the delineation of a kind of vocabulary
of the CRI is based on pieces of government discourse, which
I will frequently invoke as quotes.
Another aspect of my analysis is tracing how the CRI is
defined by new conditions and technologies for production
and organization, and to outline policies and consequent
changes brought about by this. There is a place within the
economic and semantic fields that has opened out in the
course of complex developments over the past seventy-or-so
years, which now accommodates the idea and purpose of
the Creative Industries. This is of course marked by conflict,
with different actors pulling in different directions and
advocating divergent and variable strategies with respect to
CRI development. I will attempt to point out some different
positionalities and the discourses they engage, particularly in
the area of policy. One such example is a paper or manifesto
written by former UK minister of culture Tessa Jowell 9 , as
well as instances of contemporary cultural policy in Brazil as
inspired by minister Gilberto Gil.
Athird point I will keep coming back to concerns the situations
of those working in the Creative Industries. Similarly to other
precarious forms of labour, the CRI are characterized by
flexibilized, insecure and underpaid work- a large economy
of internships is but one facet of this. While the hype of the
creative sets the tone of another wave of commoditization
and exploitation, it bears employment for large numbers of
people and brings forth new forms of labour. From left to
right people have argued that the kind of work characteristic
of the CRI [cognitive, intellectual, creative, immaterial, etc)
brings forth new ways of relating to work/non-work, exchange
and society. For some, the ways in which language and the
transfer of messages becomes both the means and the end
of a process of production appears to hold much promise
for the emancipation of the class of (immaterial, cognitive,
creative, etc..) workers from conditions of domination. For
others, flexibilized and self-managed labour is synonymous
9 Jowell, T (2004) Governement and the value of
Culture http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/DE2ECA49-
7F3D-46BF-9Dll-A3AD80BF54D6/0/valueofculture.pdf
visited August 2007
with exploitation, or to the contrary freedom. The analysis
of these interpretations and discourses is widely relevant
for understanding the modes of subjectivation encouraged
by the CRI regime, helping to perceive the challenges and
possibilities these developments offer.
The relations between CRI and education are a fourth recurring
aspect of this investigation. During my years of study at a
London art school I observed that the notions of creativity,
innovation and ' flexibility p\ay a large role in the recruitment for
production as well as consumption of knowledge goods (within
markets of knowledge, culture as much as communications
technology). The liberal arts college has regained relevance
for the production of national wealth in the context of CRI,
exceeding the production of just cultural capital. In similar
developments, secondary and community education come to
encompass creative training programmes.
Finally, my attempt at laying out the conditions and discourses
that inform and legitimize moving notions such as creativity
and culture into the field of economics serves to hint at
possible other ways of going about discourse, work and
policy with respect to the production of signs and meaning.
It seemed to me important to understand how policy informs
practice and how this relates to the stakes people like myself
put into cultural work. I hope to produce an outline that can
helpfully indicate what different struggles for autonomy in
this context may be structured by. Moving beyond some of
the depoliticized cultural forms brought to us via corporate
as well as government funded culture, and drawing upon
empowering and critically engaged modes of relating to
knowledge and creativity is a challenge lots of people are
busy with. While such a struggle can hardly be relevant if
based upon lament and nostalgia, an engagement with critical
analysis helps to suggest strategies and positionalities that
go beyond complacency and defeatism, or opportunism and
discursive game. It seems to me that spaces related to art and
culture hold much potential for encouraging the facilitation
of debate, movement and research around contemporary
cultural, social and political activities and developments,
their realities and relations to markets.
1. Culture and Industry
The Culture Industry
When tracing the history of the concept of "Creative
Industries", there are many possible paths to take. The
Frankfurt Schools "Culture Industry" concept is one evident
trajectory, marking the first generic term that appeared
in the context of expanding economies of mass cultural
production. While there is certainly a correlation between
Culture Industry and CRI, it needs to be noted that the Culture
Industry concept has much more of a history, outlining some
of the developments that make conditions of possibility for
the CRI. New technologies enabling the mass distribution of
culture, and a clear reference to fordist modes of production
and dissemination are at the heart of the Culture Industry
paradigm, and can help situate the different context in which
the CRI is situated- a new organization of labour within
knowledge economies.
"Kulturindustrie", best translates as "Culture Industry" and is
a term that was coined by T.W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer in
the 1940s 10 , mainly to substitute for the word 'mass culture'
in their theoretical writing 11 . "Mass Culture" appeared too
ambivalent a term, because it not only implies a centralized
way of producing/ distributing culture but also carries an
undertone of a culture of the masses, made by and for the
masses. "Culture industry" seemed to appropriately de-mystify
the idea that the role of culture in war/post-war Europe at
10 Adorno. T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (2002) Dialectic
Of Enlightenment Stanford: Stanford University Press
11 Due to its historical context, the "Cultural
Industries" and related policy is closer to an application
of this concept than CI policy. My focus here is however on
the "Culture Industry" as a conceptual framework outlining
some of the conditions for existence of the CI.
the beginning/middle of the 20th century could be anything
but instrumental to the perpetuation and accumulation
of ideologies and capital, losing its critical potential in the
process. While A+H elaborated on much of this during the
second World War, much of Adornos writing comes from his
time in the postwar US. The US under Roosevelt and Europe
under Hitler showed similarities in their employment of mass
media as tools for large scale subjectivation 12 . As such, this
first conceptualization of a mass economy of culture by A+H
carried very negative connotations.
"Culture Industry" referred to the mass production and
distribution of symbolic structures and associated products
to a wide populace, wherein those were subject to industrial,
quasi assembly-line production and no longer depended so
much on artistic genius or craftsmanship, A+H suggested. The
opposition of the Culture Industry to supposedly true or high
art production is implicit in A+Hs writing. The "high art" that
A+H valued could apparently not exist in a populist economy
of culture, wherein mass appeal and accessibility became the
main criteria for the production of signs and codes (rather
than prestige within a small circle of connoisseurs).
The Culture Industry referred to a framework of centralized
state media and cultural institutions and an increasing
influence of corporations thereupon, putting powerful
conglomerates in a position to mainstream ideas- mainly
nationally but increasingly also internationally, an example
being the export of Hollywood films. This was made possible
via new communications technology that could broadcast
information via long distances and at fast pace, delivering
products such as radio shows, music, film and television
as well as news and advertising to large audiences from a
central source.
The concept of Culture Industry has been highly influential in
terms of offering an analysis of a mass production of culture,
and was taken as a warning of the influence of US cultural
exports, which led most European countries to refrain from
structuring cultural policy accordingly. It was only in the
1970s that the UNESCO adopts the idea of "free flow of
information", however as a democratic principle, not as a
means of defending the interests of American Transnational
Corporations (UNESCO policies like the "cultural exception",
which aims to protect local culture through not liberalizing
fields such as audiovisual production, attest to this today) 13
. The UK, France and Holland adopted the Culture Industries
as model similarly early, taking account its critique by A+H to
different degrees.
A core philosophical question raised by A+Hs Culture
Industry concept is that around the value assigned to culture.
In how far does an instrumentalization of cultural activity for
economic purposes bear danger? What were the relations
between economy and culture throughout the centuries,
and how did the 20 th century differ from those? How are we
to define "cultural activity" in the first place- what kind of
concept is culture?
"Culture"
Felix Guattari offers an analysis of ways of conceiving of
culture in his essay "Culture; un concept reactionnaire?",
which goes a long way in illuminating the link between
Culture- and Creative Industries. He argues that culture is
a profoundly reactionary concept, because it can only exist
when limited to certain spheres and applications, such as
the market, nationalism or collectivism. "Culture" can not
autonomously exist otherwise, because the kind of activity
it refers to is inseparable from life, hence to call only certain
things by this name (such as certain products/ productions,
things of a certain origin etc) is a reactionary gesture.
12 While Edward Bernais was in the process of
"inventing" PR and consumer culture in the US, Hitler was
forging a racist and nationalist kind of culture in Europe.
13 For a brief yet excellent history of the Culture
Industries concept in relation to Cultural Industries, see
Segers, K. and Huijgh, E. (2006) Clarifying the complexity
and ambivalence of the Cultural Industries, Gent, Re-
creatiefvlaanderen Research Project http://www. re-
creatiefvlaanderen.be/srv/pdf/srcvwp 200602.pdf . visited
September 2007
31
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
In capitalism, "culture" is to subjectivity what capital is to
economy- a means of subjectivation, which allows this system
to function as it does. The particular form of subjectivation
favoured in capitalist culture is that of individuation, which
occurs en masse through personal and psychological as
much as machinic, economic, social, technological, iconical,
ecological, ethological, mediatic systems- the notion of
"culture" being at the forefront of most of them.
According to Guattari, there are three main ways of
encapsulating "culture" by way of assigning specialized value
it. The first such conception of culture corresponds to some
extent with the idea of "high" and "low" culture as invoked by
A+H. This refers to "culture" as a means (and end) to making
power relations, by virtue of which the status of an elite is
legitimized and maintained. In this sense, the distinction
between cultivated/ uncultivated people, high/ low culture
or sophisticated/ popular culture qualifies who has access
to and controls semiotic production and structures of power
and decision making. This conception of culture helps sustain
processes of subordination along the axes of class, race and
gender 14 . Culture in this sense is something one does or does
not have (and only rarely can acquire), defining social and
economic status.
The second way of investing the notion of culture with
meaning is somewhat opposite to the first one- referring to a
collective asset, something that everybody has and that can be
categorized ad infinitum via anthropological or ethnological
methods. Culture as the essence and soul of civilization,
a kind of a priori which in its different manifestations or
classifications can serve nationalist (Volkskultur), conservatist
(culture francaise) as well as universalist (cultures of the
world, UNESCO) agendas. This second variant is frequently
employed in government discourse and specifically marks
cultural policy documents, which often describe the value of
culture in national as well as collective and humanist terms (I
will refer to this later on).
The third common notion of culture is that of a field of
production and consumption of (often immaterial) goods-
this industrial kind of culture is also at the basis of "creative"
culture in its CRI encapsulation. "Culture" in this sense
denotes anything that contributes to semiological production-
be it books, films, studios, persons, equipment, museums,
cultural centers, media etc- and that thereby contributes to a
market that can be regulated to a greater or lesser extent. It is
the sphere in which culture neither refers to the collective nor
the exclusive, supposedly keeping clear of value judgement
(while in actuality engaging both the first and second concept
of culture in favour of the third) and primarily referring to
an entity that has a place in a market. The exclusiveness
that is characteristic of the "high/ low" or "innate" type of
culture subsists in its economicist bias. This is because it is
again based upon thinking culture separately from politics
and everyday life, this time as a ghetto characterized by
the monetary (not privilege or authenticity). It is not that
it does not make sense to speak of "culture" as a field of
the production and reception of signs. Because semiotic
activity forms the very basis of our lives and subjectivities,
we need to move beyond its encapsulations, appropriating
and subverting in a singular not individualized way. Guattaris
argument is situated in the context of Brazil in the 1980s,
where such a movement seemed possible. By this time, the
"Cultural Industries" had been coined as a generic term
marking the expanding economy of culture as subject to
policy, investment and increasing analysis.
Cultural Industries and Creative
Industries
There is a lot of confusion around the concepts of Culture/
Cultural and Creative Industries, which often seem to be
used interchangeably. The "Cultural Industries" has been an
official term since the 1970s, when it came to be subject to
policy at the UNE SCO, as well as in the US, UK, France and
14 An obvious example are colonialist discourses
that assume there are uncultivated or uncivilized people as
opposed to cultivated and civilized ones, and that the latter
should dominate over the former.
Netherlands. At UNESCO and in Europe, it demarcated de/
regulatory policies, bringing the "Culture Industry" concept
to a critical policy level. While the "Culture Industry" and
"Cultural Industry" clearly emerged in the 20 th century, the
"Creative Industries" was a term that came to be frequently
used since the 1990s and bears close connection to the
dotcom boom and the beginnings of knowledge economies.
Intellectual property is at the center of the CRIs economically
oriented policy. Cultural Industries also embrace IP fully
since the late 20 th century, however they are based on an
older and more socially and democratically oriented model
of cultural production than CRI, which stem out of a context
of a knowledge economy, of the digital and post-fordist
production. The modes of dissemination and production
engaged by the CRI are defined by this right from the start.
The emergence of creative industries is related to the rise
of culture industries [sic], the significance of knowledge
to all aspects of economic production, distribution and
consumption, and the growing importance of the services
sector 15
The most mentioned factors contributing towards the
development of the Cultural Industries into a flourishing
economic sector include: rising prosperity in industrialized
regions A increasing leisure time, rising levels of literacy, links
between the new medium of television and new discourses of
consumerism, theincreasingimportanceof 'cultural hardware'
(hi-fi, TV sets, and later VCRs and personal computers) for
the consumer goods industry, and so on 16 . Television and
Radio, which Adorno commented on extensively, marked the
beginning of an age in which informational networks started
to go global, making communications and information design
increasingly important sectors of industrialized countries,
particularly for spreading the cultural and economic hegemony
of the so-called West. With these possibilities to mainstream
culture on a global scale, a shift occurred in industrialized
countries from manufacturing jobs to services jobs:
Between 1971 and 2001, Britain lost 4m manufacturing jobs,
but gained 3m business service jobs, 2,3m jobs in distribution
and leisure, and 2m positions in the public sector 17
The creative economy in Britain today employs 1.8m
people 18 . The growth of the internet further reinforced
and accelerated the production and distribution of signs,
enabling the development of a new sector of economy which
is increasingly informational, global and networked (Terry
Flew) and creating jobs in the process. While leading towards
the CRI, this technological change also brought forth peer to
peer infrastructures and collaborative modes for sharing ideas
and information, which are incorporated in the CRI concept
alongside strictly proprietary and individualistic models. 19
All of these shifts could and have however also been
incorporated by the Cultural Industries. What marks the
difference between such an incorporation and the CRI regime
is that the latter extends beyond the sphere of cultural policy.
At the basis if this is the linguistic shift from "cultural" to
"creative", which allows for a further injection of the economic
into policy that m ight not be possible on a similar scale in
15 Flew, T. (2002) Beyond ad-hocery: defining
the creative industries http://eprints.qut.edu.au/
archive/00000256/ visited August 2007 (note the use of
the term "Culture Industries", a mix of A+Hs concept and
the "Cultural Industries")
16 Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Staying
ahead, (Introduction), ibid
17 Nathan, M. (2005) Centre for Cities Discussion
Paper- The Wrong Stuff? Creative class theory, diversity and
city performance UK: Institute for Public Policy Research
http://www.ippr.org.uk/publicationsandreports/publication.
aS p?id=448 visited August 2007
18 Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Staying
ahead, (Introduction), ibid
19 While describing the internet as a constitutive
part of the knowledge economy, it is important to note that
within the internet as much as the creative sectors, different
forms of economy exist- high tech gift economies are often a
starting point for the networked production of signs.
the context of Cultural Industries, because of the democratic
and critical principles inscribed in them.
From the context of the UK, the rise of Cultural Industries
policy and terminology is often explained via the Greater
London Councils development of cultural policies in the 1980s
and onwards 20 . Andy Pratt and David Hesmondhalgh suggest
that one factor for the change in terminology was the desire
of the politically centrist UK labour government of the late
1990s to distance themselves from the activities of left-wing
metropolitan councils such as the Greater London Council and
Sheffield in the 1980s. This was a step towards liberalization
of cultural policy that the CRI now incorporates.
The Cultural Industries and the Creative Industries regimes
don't foreclose one another, indeed they perfectly coexist in
(post-) national economies. In the UK, the CRI have gained in
momentum since the 80s, while on mainland Europe they are
being introduced more slowly into prevailing socially oriented
cultural policies. The term "Creative Industries" shows to have
been increasingly in use since 1990, most frequently in the UK
(where a liberalization of cultural sectors has been ongoing
since 1980 and had much impact on business, education
and urban planning) and in France (where a minister of
culture Jack Lang in 1982 held a plea for more government
intervention in this field) 21 . But even in countries with
advanced CRI policies, certain cultural sub-sectors continue
to be subject to regulation (such as film, radio, television;
libraries, archives and museums)- as propose protectionist
measures of UNESCO 22 .
This does not mean that Cultural Industries are not part of
the picture anymore. It does not seem possible at this point
to draw a distinction between Cultural Industries and Creative
Industries based on fundamental differences- the two merge
to various degrees in different national policies. However it
can be said that certain tendencies are more present in the
concept of CRI, such as the exploitation of IP and increased
deregulation. In the UK, a new report now suggests that the
CRI entail the Cultural Industries rather than vice versa.
Clearly the CRI is gaining momentum in post- industrial
societies 23 , and its regime comes to dominate over many
types of production.
2. Creative Industries
Definitions and Organization
The creative industries is a field which some take to include
not only
[... ^advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market,
crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, interactive
leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing,
software and computer games, television and radio, but also
20 Hesmondalgh, D. and Pratt, A. (2005) Creative
Industries: Cultural Industries and Cultural Policy
International Journal of Cultural Policy Vol 11, No. 1 www.
artsmanagement.net/downloads/hesmondhalgh.pdf visited
August 2007
The culture industries began to emerge as an issue in local
policy-making in London early 1980, and were implemented
in Sheffield's culture industries policies, which helped to
spread the notion of local culture-industries policies, in
particular the notion of 'the cultural quarter'
21 Segers, K. and Huijgh, E. (2006) Clarifying the
complexity and ambivalence of the Cultural Industries,
Gent, Re-creatiefvlaanderen Research Project
http://www. re-creatiefvlaanderen.be/srv/pdf/
srcvwp 200602.pdf . visited September 2007
22 http://www.unesco.org/culture/industries/trade/
html eng/questionl7.shtml visited September 2007
23 In UK government policy reports, the CRI seem
to be at the center of attention with less mention of
Cultural Industry and no mention of Culture Industry
occurs. In European Union and national cultural policy on
the Continent, the term Culture Industry appears more
frequently still.
32
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
low art' forms such as heritage, tourism (cultural and mass),
and sport 24
...but also manufacturing industries such as CD pressing
plants, the printing of inlays, distribution and retail. If
seen in all its aspects as an economic sector, the CRI
include various facilities for the production of hardware and
knowledge products. This conglomerate of sectors seems
highly problematic, since each of its component fields has
a different investment in "culture", a different history and
engages different modes of production. While levels of
deregulation differ for each of these fields even in Creative
Industries policy, the question perhaps is how long this is to
last under a regime clearly and explicitly following economic
imperatives.
In geographic terms, the CRIs increasing economic importance
today is not limited to the northern hemisphere or so-called
West, but to information-driven societies. The UNESCO
reports that the "culture industry" markets have changed
from being dominated by US business to being fairly equally
distributed between US, Europe and Asia today 25 . At the
same time, power and profit today resides with a few global
megacorporations that produce, market and patent cultural
products (Viacom, Time Warner, Disney; Bertelsmann; Sony;
News Corporation, Seagram..)- those are mainly based in the
US. High literacy, access to education, media, technology and
a mass market for culture, are prerequisites profitable CRI- in
this respect there are new and potent markets developing in
Asia particularly.
antiques markets, as well as television, publications and
spectacle, each of which raise enormous profits. The UK
engage a well trained and educated population of creative
workers that get much support from government for
developing business and products if they play by the rules
of IP, self- exploitation and gentrification. In this sense, CRI
operate on national levels- nation states increasingly compete
for extensive accommodation and education of CRI workers
who hold the promise of bringing future wealth. The CRI
function internationally in the sense of being embedded
in and constitutive of a globalised market for information,
knowledge, communications strategies and technologies,
and also because there are transnational strategies for
development of CRI such as those of the European Union.
Who are Creative Industries workers
and what difference do they make?
Those who might be referred to as CRI workers are hard to
trace statistically, since much of the work in the creative
sector occurs without long- term contracts, unregistered
and/or for free, and/or tax-exempt. There can hardly be a
reasonable analysis of average incomes or working conditions
beyond the different sectors that constitute the CRI. While the
CRI and corresponding jobs grow exponentially, there is still
much to be understood about the way these jobs function-
how well they pay, how long they last, what kinds of lifestyle
they require and foster, what the futures of young generations
of CRI workers might look like, and how this differs within the
CRI. 27
a desired or consciously elected state, but that the economy
of internships, short term and flexible labour that emerges
through the demand for visibility and success within the
cultural- creative sector forces workers to make themselves
precarious, taking up lots of jobs, working for free here and
there, and trying to fill CVs with experiences that raise their
cultural capital. This can determine the lives of both manual
and cognitive workers, of cleaners as much as programmers,
and is often contingent with the financial, family and
residency status. Minimum access to former public services
such as medical care, insurance, pensions are characteristic
of precarity.
The problem with most intellectual and CRI work is that,
whether in the context of self employment or a contract,
labour time is hardly structured by working hours and most
of the time far exceeds the time one would spend working
in any kind of office job on a similar or higher salary. The
highly competitive jobs in the CRI mostly require teamwork,
and while this might give the allusion of collaboration or
horizontal power relations, the contrary is mostly the case.
Relationships between people in higher and lower positions
are casual, which makes it even more difficult to leave work
at a given time when the boss, who one is on friendly terms
with, is still sitting in the back office.
Relating these living and working conditions to those of the
industrial proletariat and its struggle, the term "precariat"
has been coined and invested with the hope for a new class
consciousness. In referring to those primarily working
intellectually, Franco "Bifo" Berardi suggested the term
"cognitariat", a working class of intellectual workers who
often hold university degrees and come from lower middle
class families yet live precariously. Again there is allusion
to possibilities for solidarity and movement among such
people 30 . Overtly political in their emphasis, the mentioned
conceptualizations are meant to help understand and subvert
shifting processes of subjectivation in order to bring about
social change, not to count or classify people. In the framework
of economy-oriented CRI policy on the contrary, increasing
attempts to statistically capture and categorize workers are
undertaken, in order to understand the their lifestyles and to
build on new ways of disciplinary subjectivation from there.
Discourse is one crucial means for doing this, and will be
investigated further on.
The "Creative Class"
The probably most well known theory about the subjects of
creative labour is that of the "Creative class". It refers to the
benefits of a high-skilled creative or cognitive workforce that
works on designing and managing information and is mostly
based in urban cores and brings major revenue to cities. This
part of the CRI has received much attention and praise in
recent years, after Richard Florida published a book that was
to become a kind of bible for urban and CRI policy makers as
much as creative enterprises.
His 2002 book "The Rise of the Creative Class" proposes
that 31
metropolitan regions with high concentrations of high-
tech workers, artists, musicians, gay men, and a group he
describes as "high bohemians", correlate with a higher level
of economic development than cities and regions that are
lacking these. [...] attracting and retaining high-quality talent-
rather than building large job-creation infrastructure projects
such as sports stadiums, iconic buildings, shopping centres
- would be a better primary use of a city's regeneration
resources for long-term prosperity [...] Florida has devised
his own ranking systems that rate cities by a "Bohemian
index, " a "Gay index, " a "diversity index" and similar criteria.
(Wikipedia: Richard Florida)
30 Berardi, F.B. Interview with Matthew Fuller http://
subsol.c3.hu/subsol 2/contributorsO/bifotext.html visited
August 2007
31 Florida, R. (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class
■ Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the
economic development race http://www.washingtonmonthiy.
com/features/2001/0205.f lorida.html visited August 2007
It is mainly in urban cores that information gets designed,
content gets created and desire produced, while at the
center as well as the margin there are information processing
factories and telecommunications centers that constitute a
huge, but less visible part of the CRI. Much of the work that
gets categorized as CRI-relevant is outsourced (call-centers,
hardware manufacture, film production, etc). Arguably there
is little guarantee for tolerable working conditions in such
production spaces, however there are also large numbers of
information workers working under precarious conditions in
city centers and suburbs. Working conditions vary greatly, and a
detailed analysis of the divergent modes of cultural production
would be very necessary to understand how divergent forms
of labour can come together under the concept and policy
of CRI. In the many fields lumped together under the CRI
there are expectations and subjectivities that greatly vary. It
is clear that not all people working in the creative economy
have their employer or state provide them with social security,
a decent contract and wage, or the feeling that they are being
creative and free. There should be no illusion that CRI labour
necessarily means teamwork and champagne- sipping, or that
it is marked by any more freedom than a teaching job- the
contrary is perhaps the case. Gerald Raunig calls the creative
industries
[...] postfordist versions of the huge structures of culture
industry, which tend to limit, rather than to expand the range
and the concepts of what is mainstreamed as culture. [...]
Cultural heritage thus develops into a tool for restricting
the public spheres, culture industries turn out to induce
postfordist processes of (self-) exploitation, and cultural
identity becomes a concept to justify exclusion and wars. 26
Within the UK, the CRI are most focused on knowledge
and software production, notably the games, design, arts+
24 quoting the UK governments Creative
Industries website http://www.culture.gov.uk/about us/
creativeindustries/ visited May 2007
25 figures according to a UNESCO faq on "Cultural
Industries": http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-
URL_ID=18671&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.
html
26 Raunig, G. and Kaufmann. T. (2002) Anticipating
European Cultural Policies
Position Paper on European Cultural Policies by Therese
Kaufmann/ Gerald Raunig, eipcp, Vienna, ei pep http://eipcp.
net/policies/aecp/kaufmannraunig/en : see also http://
eipcp.net/policies/cci for an eipcp issue on the "critique of
creative industries" , visited August 2007
Intellectual, Cognitive, Creative, Cybernetic, Virtuoso, ...
labour and the kinds of subjects and social dynamics these
generate has been extensively theorized from both the left and
the right (since the industrial revolution until this day 28 ). There
are various claims as to how this "new class" of knowledge
workers would transform things; by generating prosperity
via IP, by forging a new class consciousness, by revitalizing
run-down areas, by making virtuosic and subversive use of
technology and design, by forging a new kind of flexibilized
labour, by forging cybernetic communism through peer-to-
peer culture, and so forth.
In the context of operaismo for example, Paolo Virno speaks
about the virtuosity of what he calls Culture Industry labour
as opposed to fordist labour- communicative activity which
has itself as an end- and because of the political potential of
any activity without an end, he assigns it political potential 29 .
The concept of the multitude and its organization for him is
closely connected to the form and organization of virtuosic
labour.
Precariousness, Precarity or the Precariat are often invoked
to refer to the 'new class' of workers, of which the creative
and cognitive labour sector constitutes a significant part, be
it manufacturing of computer chips, designing of websites or
writing of scholarly articles.
Coming from the French term precarite, precarity is a very
recent term used to refer to either intermittent work or, more
generally, a confluence of intermittent work and precarious
existence. In this latter sense, precarity is a condition of
existence without predictability or job security, affecting
material or psychological welfare.
(Wikipedia, precarity, Oct 06)
Gerald Raunig refers to the 'self- precarization' of cultural
producers. I expect he does not mean to say that precarity is
27 Total creative employment increased from 1 . 6m
in 1997 to 1.8m in 2005, an average growth rate of 2%
per annum, compared to 1% for the whole of the economy
over this period. Department for Culture, Media and Sport
(DCMS) UK (2006) Creative Industries Repor t http://www.
culture.gov.uk/Reference library/Research/statistics
outputs/creative industries eco est.htm visited July 2007
28 Barbrook, R. (2004), ibid
29 Virno, P (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude:
section 4.5 Culture Industry: anticipation and paradigm,
Paris: Semoitexte www.generation-online.org/c/
fcmultitude3.htm visited July 2007
33
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
While it takes many of his cues from the growth of the London
creative sector and the influence of policy upon it, Floridas
model has been taken up by many city councils (including
London) as a means to attracting capital into low-income
urban areas. The problem with Floridas regeneration theory,
which works very well in terms of economic profit, is that it
encourages processes of exclusion through gentrification -a
process the upper strata of creative workers is involuntarily
implicated in. For people existing in the areas in question- be
they low-income families, creative workers, migrants, elderly
people and so forth, it implies rising rent prices or even
eviction or demolition of (mostly social) housing, and the
colonization of neighbourhoods by well-off young workers,
families and consumers. Existing communities disintegrate
while inhabitants are forced out of those districts towards
suburban areas, where gentrification processes are bound
to sooner or later repeat 32 . The atmosphere of creativity,
openness and tolerance characteristic of low-income "creative"
areas results is bleak commercialization that comes in the
form of top-down imposed "culture zones". As such, Floridas
consultancy firm is highly successful 33 . Examples of "Master
Plan" regeneration projects and their effects on communities
and urban design are abundant- whether or not they refer
to creative workers as a starting point for regeneration, the
accommodation of CRI businesses is usually a concern. Within
the UK, the installation of the Sheffield Cultural quarter 34 is
an example.
3. Creative Industries policy
Intellectual Property
Within the CRI, exploitation of Intellectual Property is a key
phrase. There is paradox in positing non-diminishable and
collective resources such as knowledge, ideas and creativity
as proprietary. The proposal of exploitation always refers to
a resource, and while natural resources are more tangible
through being easy to locate and finite, it is not clear how
knowledge and creativity can be understood in this sense.
Ideas can not really be finite nor attached to one single
person, and so a generation of scarcity of knowledge needs
more than just a proprietary regime, but a new mode of
understanding knowledge generally. It seems to me that this
is achieved through a discourse that has been on the rise with
knowledge economies 35 .
Nurturing and rewarding creative talent is the start of the
intellectual property value chain and Intellectual Property
Rights (IPR) are at the core of creative industries existence.
However, government recognises issues surrounding IPR are
of significance beyond the 'creative industries' and must be
considered in tha t context. The creative industries are one of
32 (34) The "regeneration" phases within the urban
areas in question are generally portrayed as a glorious
succeeding of creativity, sanitariness and growth over bad
infrastructure, stagnation and misery, like an urbanist
American dream coming true. What occurs during
gentrification processes is merely a displacement of misery
and not its undoing. People who can't afford to invest in
private housing or privatized education will not come to be
part of an affluent creative class and not have a part of any
creative quarter unless councils make a concerted effort to
support and include them, the contrary of which is generally
the case. Regenerated areas often do not permit for organic
growth of communities and space, but prescribe a strict
regime of allocation to consumers, affluent residents, small
creative businesses and corporations. Investors rarely have
a stake other than financial in the concerned district, for
example its social history or future.
33 (35) http://www.creativeclass.org/ visited May
2007
34 (36) ( http://www.creativesheffield.co.uk/ . 2004-
ongoing
35 (37) Wikipedia defines "knowledge economy" like
this:
...an interconnected, globalised economy where knowledge
resources such as know-how, expertise, and intellectual
property are more critical than other economic resources
such as land, natural resources, or even manpower.
the UK's major economic success stories, growing at more
than twice the national average, representing 8% of GDP. Yet
they are facing opportunities and threats - particularly with
the advent of the digital environment and advances in new
technologies. The effective exploitation of IP will be the key
to their success in meeting these challenges and continuing
this economic growth.
http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/Creative_industries/
Reference to success, threat/security and opportunity help
with ignoring the question: what will happen if the realm of
ideas, like the material world, becomes subject entirely to
ownership regulations? Will it mean the immediate absorption
of any idea into the market, so that only ideas of a certain
age would be "free" and the all the rest would be free market
ideas (assuming copyright law remains limited to the lifetime
of an author plus some years)?
The timely reference to "threats" links up with discourses
surrounding terrorism in the context of a politics of fear, and
is an effective way of proposing IP as a must-be. References
to opportunity and wealth are also highly appealing when left
so vague. The "threats" alluded to include the open source
and hackers movement as much as free webcasting and
horizontal organizational forms that come about through
software such as Wikis and file sharing sites and programs.
Since IP is the guiding principle of CRI success, it will be
important to legitimize the criminalization of those treating
knowledge as a common resource, and the marginalization of
free and open access networks. While peer to peer culture will
continue to exist, technological devices (such as the IPod) will
cooperate with government policy to make it difficult if not
impossible to get access to cultural products without paying
money for it. Court cases are only one way of safeguarding
IP The general enforcement of a legislation impacts not only
cultural production, file sharing or research and development
in science and medicine (where IP and patents were firmly
established), but also on how people communicate and share
thoughts with eachother on a daily basis.
It is worth mentioning the Creative Commons, alongside many
other efforts to counter Intellectual property regimes and the
transformation of knowledge and creativity into products
and shares. If these initiatives are not the main subject of
my text this is because my aim here is to understand the
larger (economic, legal, discursive) frameworks they operate
in- as a way of both providing context and reference for these
initiatives, be they in the fields of education, art, science etc.
CC licences are surprisingly popular amongst UK artists, a
survey by the Arts Council has shown- some 170.000 websites
in the UK now licence their work under the creative commons-
including not only young artists but also the Tate and similar
big arts business 36 . In 2006, open content licencing has been
taken up by the BBC in its Creative Archive campaign which
encourages you to "Rip it. Mix it. Share it. Come and get it."
while offering a licence that closely resembles the Creative
Commons share-alike, non-commercial, attributive licence-
with the added condition that all material is only to be further
used within the UK 37 . It seems possible to put open content
licencing to use in order to share and restrict creativity and
knowledge within a national framework.
Cultural policy and Open source
There are ways to think socially about learning, knowledge
and culture. Not only small scale initiatives and organizations
operate with and ethics of sharing and empowerment
beyond national, gender or class boundaries, furthering the
use of Open Source and increased accessibility of artistic
strategies and education to a wide population. There are also
some governments that take on this ethics, particularly in
contemporary South America.
In Brazil there are various schemes along these lines in
place, and have been going since some years now, backed by
President Lula an d Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil. One such
36 (38) http://www.netribution.co.Uk/2/content/
view/1032/182/ visited July 2007
37 (39) http://creativearchive.bbc.co.uk/
archives/2005/03/the rules in br l.html visited August
2007
scheme prescribes that 80% of businesses and government
agencies in the country convert their Computers operating
systems to Linux, an open source code. This will, through
a gradual migration campaign, come to allow communities
and agencies to customize their software to their own needs,
share expertise and learning, engage the wider community
in digital culture and finally rid the state of its dependency
on Microsoft and exorbitant package fees. This initiative is
complemented by a radical programme that distributes old
computers from businesses or government to self-education
centers poor areas, where they are set up as linux platforms
and local digital workshops are established, granting people
of all incomes access to the internet and digital technology.
The Brazilian Ministry of Culture offers various education
programmes, online platforms and networks for debate
and learning about the values of culture. This facilitation of
platforms encourages autonomous learning and sharing of
skills, which represents an approach totally opposite to the
infusion and subtle indoctrination with market knowledge
that the UK CI education schemes are working towards
under a New Labour governement. Within contemporary
Brazilian cultural policy, the focus on social problems and
the inclusion of all members of society as active participants
is a necessarily political act. The notion of inclusion, which
by US or UK standards frequently means nothing other
than the tokenistic protection of a few individuals from the
consequences of the neoliberal policy, which as the source
of exclusion is supported by these governments. Inclusion
comes to signify something else in the ideas of Gilberto Gil,
who recognizes that it must mean empowerment, creating
independence and political thinking as opposed to producing
more dependency and symbolism- approaching culture as
shareable and ideas as the open source of the citizens of
the world.
There are many other organizations and governments that
have, largely for financial reasons, made the transition from
proprietary to open source operating systems 38 . In itself, it
is of course unlikely that a switch to Open Source software
can effect much social change if it only applies to centralized
government service or economic elites and their businesses,
without being embedded in a cultural policy that engages all
its citizens with the sharing, programming and collaborative
creation of culture.
Cultural policy and Subsidy
The CRIs straightforwardly profit oriented kind of approach
offers a convenient way of circumnavigating ideas that might
otherwise or earlier have informed cultural policy. Particularly
in relation to the arts A the social, autonomy, excellence and
access have played an important role for the formulation of
UK policy in the last thirty years. The CRI is indeed about
enriching informational or entertainment products through
artistic techniques, but social, philosophical and political
problems are beyond its scope. The cultural policies that had,
in the UK of the 80s and 90s, implemented a mixing of art
with social or community work seems to fall outside of the
strict terms of the CRI: the so-called "third sector", where
artists work with NGOs or other entities who replace the state
in its social and welfare functions, does not sit well with the
CRI 39 . Yet the arts, in their entirety, are officially part of CRI in
the UK as much as where there is a CRI policy in place. With
respect to the many sectors the CRI include, there have been
and are different histories and systems of subsidy, private
sponsorship, or corporate support. For example, publishing
is based on peer to peer review and gift economies within
academia, on individual research, subsidized by government
and self, hardly privately sponsored; while architecture is
based on competitive team work, subject to government
regulations, public as well as private funding, however
considered predominantly as public service; and computer
games are corporate funded, technology based, and market
oriented. It is an open question how these fields can coincide
38 (40) Argentina, China, EU, city of Munich/
Germany, etc.. http://www.openia.com/resources/open-
source/governments#argentina
39 (41) KulturKontakt Austria (2004), ARTWORKS
project publication, Vienna; Grasl Druck und Neue Medien
www.equal-artworks.at . www.kulturkontakt.or.at
34
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
within CRI policy, or what other reason there could be for this
than moving them as far as possible into the real of the economic.
Public- Private partnerships in art and
education
Allocation of funds from private sources is a prerequisite for
the survival of museums, galleries and art centers as well
as educational institutions in the UK today 40 . For such a site
of public interest to become a viable site of investment, it
needs to enter into a contract of sponsorship, censorship,
branding, and hence into a regime of visibility and popularity.
Most institutions and projects in the sector of culture and
education need to secure a certain amount of investment
in order to prove their liability for government support. This
means adopting business models. The emergent 'Public-
private' governance of initiatives means that transmission and
research become increasingly difficult due to inaccessibility
of knowledge (copyrighted and patented information is too
either expensive or kept secret, particularly in the sciences),
increasing precarization of jobs that traditionally fell into the
public sector, and mounting fees for tuition. The "Creative
London" inititative of the London Development Agency
describes its agenda for education:
[...] when it comes to making sure that the right people with
the right creative skills are always available for the creative
industries, we're here to work closely with the educational
and training systems and look beyond traditional institutions
for talent 41
The £40 Mio. "Creative Partnerships" initiative (managed by
40 The estimates for annual corporate arts
contributions in the United States grew from $161 million
in 1977, to $496 million in 1987,to $740 million in 1995,
and to almost $1200 million in 2000, and proportionate
increases can be witnessed globally (Kindberg, V. (2003),
Corporate Arts Sponsorship, Chapter 16 in: A handbook for
cultural economics, by Ruth Towse, UK: Edward Elagar
Publishing https://ep.eur.nI/bitstream/1765/783/l/
TOWSE+EBOOK pages0155-0163.pdf . visited August 2007)
...while arts sponsorship in most cases entails negotiations
between artist and funding body, there obviously are
limitations imposed on artists working with corporate
sponsors, and these relations are subject to a different
agenda than those within state funded arts projects.
With state funding, guidelines involving criteria for public
outreach, diversity, access and community specificity often
instrumentalize potentially socially engaged and critical
projects towards forms of community art as social work,
watering down the politics of projects. These processes are
hard to circumvent and perhaps still do benefit communities
more than any glossy form of more commercial art.
Corporate sponsorship mostly means bringing content and
form of art or educational work in line with the corporation
and its product/s (Nivea funding the Palais de Tokyo
in Paris: " the skin — in all of its states — is honored"..
http://www.artforum.com/news/week=200624 ) or at
least disabling any overt criticism of issues that concern
the sponsor, arguably state funding selects projects by
standards more related to a projects relevance for a general
public at a specific time. While the private-public cultural
spaces that grow everywhere from London to Moscow do
indeed reach a wider public than traditionally bourgeois
galleries or theatres, they often sacrifice much of cultures
potential of proposing (politically positioned, radical)
critique. Late modernist 'thinking spaces' for the masses,
such as the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London
(funded by Unilever) mostly host works that impress through
resembling phallic monuments to schemas of accumulation,
power, exploitation or excess. In knowledge- driven societies,
museums, galleries and arty cafes have replaced cathedrals
and fun fayres, which is to explain the turn-of-century rash
of monumental museum building projects such as the
highly- publicised Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the billion
Dollar Getty Center in L.A, or the reconfigured industrial
cathedral on the Thames that houses the new Tate Gallery
of Modern Art.
41 www.creativelondon.org.uk , visited March 2007
Arts Council England and funded by the DfES and DCMS) is a
programme engaging
young people to experience, learn from and enjoy artistic and
creative activities [...]: Creativity in all areas of work is widely
regarded as a critical factor in the future economic success
of the country It is a source of competitive advantage in a
knowledge economy and receives considerable Government
attention and support as a result 42 .
The Creative Partnerships are a massive investment into future
generations of CI workers, parallel to the establishment and
transformation of sites to equip them with further education
and skills for creative jobs. These jobs will be based upon
the competitive exploitation of Intellectual Property and the
increased flexibility which the market requires.
It is quite clear that the kind of skills employers require now
include skills that are much wider, that you could broadly
describe under the headline of "creativity"; team working,
being able to challenge ideas, to think laterally, to have critical
understandings; those are very much the skills that Creative
Partnerships have developed 43
The Creative Industries Fact File released by the UK Department
for Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS) is concerned with
making links between higher education and the CI:
DCMS in partnership with Universities UK has established
a Creative Industries Higher Education Forum. The Forum
draws together members of Government, creative industries
and educational establishments to advise Ministers on the
strategic policies relating to education and research in the
UK creative industries. [...] Creating strong links between
Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and businesses is an
essential part of improving our economic performance, and
HEIs have an increasingly important role to play in increasing
the competitiveness of regional economies. 44
The University of the Arts London is a striking example of
CI education and Public-Private Partnerships. The university
presents its development board like this:
drawing on a broad range of expertise from across the
creative and corporate industries, the Development Council
champions the University's development programme
through the inspiration and generation of philanthropic and
sponsorship income. 45
This board consists of CEOs and Ex-CEOs of Sony, BBC, Abbey
National, Tesco, and so many more businesses, hedge funds
as well as government departments. It is commonplace to
lament the privatization of education from both the student
side (depoliticization, competition, high fees/student debt)
and the teaching side (censorship, precarious jobs, service-
character), however the CRI seem to play a particular role in
this. While a focus on creativity means the breaking away from
authoritarian modelsof teaching, theCRIseconomicallydriven
influence on education policy primarily means no "knowledge
for knowledges sake" but that the efficient education of a
creative workforce replaces pedagogy or curiosity- driven
research. Education in this sense might be understood as a
training for the exploitation of ones own ideas, rather than
encouraging processes of subjectivation that link creativity
with agency, criticality or sociality. This is of course down to
teachers as well as program guidelines, but pressure on the
former is growing.
42 http://www.creative-partnerships.com and: DCMS.
Creative Industries Fact File, Pdf www.culture.gov.uk/PDF/
ci fact file. pdf visited August 2007
43 quoting James Purnell, Secretary of State for
Culture, Media and Sport, as appointed on 28th June 2007,
formerly Minister of Creative Industries: http://www.
creative-partnerships.com/creativeind.pdf visited August
2007
44 DCMS UK, Creative Industries Fact File, Pdf www.
culture.gov.uk/PDF/ci fact file.pdf visited May 2007
45 http://www.arts.ac.uk/22389.htm visited July
2007
Intellectual Property and education
While CI students themselves become instrumental to
value production in the double sense of economic profit
and of perpetuating cults of creativity, individualism and
self- exploitation, it is only after the college years that the
reality of precarious work and life kicks in. The pressing
point remains how to pursue Open Source as a sustainable
mode of practice and life within the current system, and how
to counter the indoctrination with IP logic as a student or
teacher, questioning the supposedly consensual acceptance
of IP as inscribed in educational CRI discourse. Within
university contexts in London, campaigns such as "Own-it"
are key in producing this consent:
Within your business or your practice, you 've probably created
a wealth of in-house ideas, designs, music, writing, images
- in short, 'intellectual property' - which can make you extra
money, as long as you give it the proper legal protection. Own
It will show you how 46 .
"Own-it" is the "Creative London Intellectual Property Advice
Service", a campaign to teach CRI workers and students to
properly copyright their work. The campaign is a collaboration
between Creative London and the University of the Arts London
(specifically London College of Communication) 47 . The target
audience is students at art and design colleges, whose benefit
to (and success in) the creative economy depends upon their
understanding anduse of IP rights 48 49 .
4. Discourse
The most common notions by which to recognize CRI discourse
(as a variant of th e third type of culture outlined by Guattari)
46 http://www.own-it.org/
47 Expanding and commercialized educational
institutions such as the Unviersity of the Arts London
may serve as examples of how national CI policy can go
hand in hand with a reinterpretation of pedagogy. Every
year through the University of the Arts, an average of
25.000 students get recruited to the world of CI via glossy
brochures that promise fame and creative careers and are
distributed in upper class arts and secondary schools in
not just the Uk but many countries. The university invests
in massive media and promotional campaigns as well as
branding in order to attract international students who
pay roughly 10.000 GBP per year to the Universities in
fees as well as home students who pay about 3000 GBP
per annum. The number of students/money attracted and
visibility/money gained by the University and its students
and employees in turn leads to further funding from the
government via the Research Assessment Exercise amongst
other things. The gained capital is to be invested in the
further recruitment of students to the institution and
achievement of more visibility and excellence. "Excellence"
is one of those buzzwords that justify rigor in learning/
teaching/ research primarily if there are measurable
outcomes, to do with grants, prizes and other investment
attracted, www.arts.ac.uk and see also "UAL ventures"
website
48 The figure of the artist often serves as role model
for creative heroines- supposedly autonomous, governed
by their own desire, adventurous and bohemian. Artists
are perfect examples of isolated yet wildly networking
individuals that exploit themselves in the name of creativity,
decadence or genius.
49 An example in Germany is the Volkswagen Autouni
- a steel and glass corporate university in Wolfsburg with
a library at the Universitate der Kunste Berlin, which
collaborates with various other Universities worldwide
(Stanford/US, Uni der Kunste/ Berlin, etc). VW Uni outlines
its Philosophy quite blatantly:
Knowledge affords the crucial competitive advantage in
today's information society. As a consequence, all teaching,
training and research activities conducted by AutoUni
are aimed at making the Group stronger in the face of
competition.
http://www.autouni.de/autouni publish/master/en/
philosophy.html visited July 2007
35
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
currently appear to be creativity, innovation, enterpreneurship,
talent, skills, intellectual property, opportunity, knowledge
transfer. They promise self- realization, via a discourse in
which pleasure and freedom act as a disciplinary device.
Below I refer to three of these notions and the way they are
put to use in different CRI scenarios.
Creativity
As many of the quotes in this paper make visible, the word
creativityhas its heyday within the context of the economization
of ideas. In its (latin) origin it refers to a potential for growth.
In the contemporary discourses around the CRI, it insinuates
a potential that everyone has to bring about something new
and other at the benefit of society at large, at the same time
defining the outcome of this process as proprietary. To be
creative refers to activities that contribute to the making
of protocols which can be transferred into knowledge
capital. Creativity hence does not necessarily signify a big,
mysterious or artistic gesture nor a generous contribution
or offer to society (with its connotations linked to maternity,
nourishment, growth and collectivity). The association of
creativity with self-expression, collectivity and benevolence is
of course intentional and important for the desire production
on which the CRI thrives. In real terms however, creativity
marks a move that allows for the transfer of an aesthetic
and intellectual configuration into a marketable product. It
will have to be the production of something new or different.
Originality plays a role in this, however not necessarily
denoting authenticity but a trick that marks the intelligent
use of ones own creative "resource". As such, being creative
is not necessarily a straightforwardly self-expressive act, but
an individualized speculative and tactical action.
Linked to the notions of talent and innovation, creativity is
a kind of everymans capital, reminiscent of the American
dream or in any case of something egalitarian: everyone is an
artist, and it only takes commitment and competitiveness to
ascend within the world of creativity. While "talent" asserts
less of an egalitarian viewpoint, it is precisely through the
coupling of the exclusiveness of "talent" and the inclusiveness
of "creativity", that makes the CRI attractive. Creativity can
be related to art, bohemia, genius, autonomy, creationism,
collectivity, equality, essence and also capital and career, in
any combination. It is a flexible idea for flexible people.
The context of the CRI makes a differentiated position on
creativity necessary: defending it as a collectively accessible
asset and which no one can definitely appropriate (potential
for social and political subversion included), or praising it as
a new kind of ore that can and should be discovered and
extracted from human brains and communities for exploitation
(promise of increasing wealth included). Of course such a
clear cut definition seems implausible, because it would again
lead to encapsulation and because socially and economically
oriented ideas about creativity blend to various degrees, with
accordingly many strategies and kinds of policy. Creativity
is similar to culture in this sense, a profoundly reactionary
concept since it can not really be separated from life, but
is instrumentalized via the construction of a discourse that
inscribes it in a specific realm such as that of the economic.
Innovation
Innovation - the successful exploitation of new ideas - is the
key business process that enables UK businesses to compete
effectively in the increasingly competitive global environment.
The Department is working to stimulate a significant increase
in innovation throughout the economy. 50
The link between creativity and innovation is often explained
as innovation being an application of ideas, approaches
or actions that creativity produces. In this sense, creativity
is the mythical process of inspiration and cognition, while
innovation is the copyrighting and marketing thereof. In recent
UK government discourse however, innovation increasingly
appears in relati on to institutions, indeed as an institution
50 UK Department for Business, Enterprise and
Regulatory Reform: http://www.dti.gov.uk/innovation/
visited August 2007
itself, an almost mechanical procedure which government can
give structure and assistance with. It is in this sense that I will
read innovation, departing from CRI discourse. There seems
to have occurred a linguistic turn around the millennium
whereby "innovation" got firmly attached to the exploitation
of ideas mainly in the CRI, ICT and science sectors.
Within the UK, the discourses conveying this as well as the
policies effecting it have been present for some time, and
notions like research, forecasting and futurecastinghave been
much linked to innovation, meaning the project of increasing
business performance and profit through empiricist and
speculative investigation. (53) 51 Within research culture
at Universities, this use of the notion of innovation marks
a shift away from humanist arguments about the value of
culture and knowledge, moving from a pursuit of knowledge
for the benefit of civil society to a performance- oriented
view of knowledge as currency, and creatives, academics
and scientists as the ones responsible for investing this
ideas capital into innovative applications. Knowledge transfer
is the cynical notion that describes this simple process of
(extraction of ideas)- conversion of ideas into a packet or
product- transfer or sale to another organization or business-
application to a market or community). The UK Department
for Trade and Industries established this as a priority in its
2002 Review for New Public Spending Plans 2003-2006:
15.7 Commercial exploitation: universities and public sector
research establishments are responding to the challenge of
knowledge transfer. An expanded Higher Education Innovation
Fund, incorporating University Challenge and Science
Enterprise Challenge, will benefit from annual funding of £90
million by 2005-06 (including £20 million from DfES). 52
The "London Innovation" Initiative by the London Development
Agency offers another example of how the key terms are put
to use:
In order to increase innovation in London's businesses we aim
to:
* encourage competitiveness, creativity and enterprise
* increase knowledge transfer and innovation in business
* promote London's universities as one of the Capital's key
global strengths 53
In the popular interfaces of CRI discourse (brochures,
websites, advertisements), the notions of "creativity" as much
as "innovation" still carry the aftertaste of ideals of freedom,
autonomy and genius, while CRI policy discourse makes fairly
clear that most of these terms, which have been appropriated
from the cultural sector, are to be read as dispositifs or
apparatuses that guide the extraction of economic profit,
correspondingtoclearsetsof procedures, but holdingnoclaim
to being meaningful beyond this application. With a definition
of creativity as something quantifiable that comes in pounds
or points, research, innovation and creativity are currencies
in the knowledge economy that buy access to survival and
profit (via funding and investment). Without reference to this
51 another example of a University Research+
Innovation Unit:
The University of Edinburgh is Scotland's leading research
university with an international reputation for world-
class research across a wide range of disciplines. The
University is also very successful in commercialising the
major scientific advances, discoveries, inventions and
innovations generated by this research. Edinburgh Research
and Innovation (ERI) seeks to promote the University of
Edinburgh's world-class research and commercialisation
activities to potential research sponsors and collaborators,
licensees or investors.
http://www. research-innovation.ed.ac.uk/ visited July 2007
52 DTI (2002), New Public Spending Plans 2003-
2006, "Investing in Science, Innovation, Enterprise and
Competition"
http://www.archive2.official-documents.co.uk/document/
cm55/5570/5570- 15.htm visited August 2007
53 London Innovation is an initiative led by the LDA
to promote the region's key strengths and deliver polices
which will ensure the future success of London as a base for
business development.
http://www.lda.gov.uk/server/show/nav.001002003005
visited August 2007 07
capital, no creative enterprise or individual will succeed in the
upper strata of the CRI. It is only available to those that have
already firmly placed their creative capital on the market,
through university education or other ventures.
Talent
Together with creativity, the notion of talent offers a viable
approach to recruiting for participation in creative enterprise
and/or consumption of semiotic products. An interesting
case study with respect to this is former UK minister of
culture Tessa Jowells paper (or manifesto) on "Government
and the value of culture" from May 2004, in which the notion
of talent is somewhat central.
Struggling to establish an argument for the value and
hence public funding of "complex" cultural forms, Jowell
distinguishes more challenging and deeply enriching/
touching art forms from entertainment, however apparently
without wanting to reproduce set distinctions between so-
called low and high culture or art. It seems she mainly talks
about art when she says culture, and indeed her paper is a
document pertaining to arts policy. This could be read as a
proposal to go back to the first encapsulation of "culture"
as described by Guattari, and perhaps it is also because
public funding for art has a troubled history and fairly small
acceptance margin in the UK, whereas culture seems more
legitimate a term to cherish. Jowell launches a complex and
somewhat unfortunate rhetorical manoeuvre aimed at the
makers and judges of UK cultural policy:
[...] We need the mechanisms in place so that a child with a
talent will be able to take that talent as far as they wish to go,
bounded only by the limits of that talent, and not constrained
by their social and economic circumstances. If they decide
to take their talent as far as it can go, we need the means to
support them in this. Many of the building blocks are in place,
many more are still to be put there. But only by accepting that
it is a child's right to be given the means by which to engage
with culture will we be able to move forward. By accepting
culture is an important investment in personal social capital
we begin to justify that investment on culture's own terms. 54
She adopts "mechanistic" as well as social democrat (her
being a labour minister) metaphors to make her point, in
conjunction with a host of notions that overlap with neoliberal
CRI discourse, and the celebratory tone of someone arguing
within a context they know to be somewhat hostile to their
ideas. In the UK, it seems that culture departments have
to struggle with the overbearing presence and affirmation of
national identity via sports- the relations between the state,
the arts sector and CRI have changed much in recent decades,
largely due to growing Cultural Industries and CRI. After a
system of arts subsidy that mainly benefited the prestigious
and national arts organizations (the patrician elite that is
blamed to have dominated over cultural production in the UK
for so long) had been put in place by the Arts Council of Great
Britain after 1945, in order to promote "British Culture", the
UK under the Conservatives cut arts subsidy and encouraged
private sponsorship. From the 90s onward, when the arts
field had already been considerably commercialized, the Arts
Council England (under Labour) adopted a more socially and
diversity-driven arts policy, increasingly engaging the arts as
"third sector" through which to compensate for the retreat
of a welfare state, while continuing to encourage corporate
support. In turn, the arts had been under attack for being
elitist, and later on, populist- the "access vs. excellence"
debate. While Jowell advocates a more excellence-driven
approach, she laments the instrumentalization of art for
social purposes as well as the popularization of art as a loss
of quality and real engagement. She speaks of culture in
order to avoid association with "high art" and also to allow
for association with "national culture" etc. She is defending
arts policy against too much of a market oriented approach,
as is the case with CRI. It is likely that 2004 was a strategic
moment for her to launch such an argument, as CRI policy
was becoming more and more of an issue influencing cultural
policy. Her vocabulary borrows from various discourses to
make her approa ch appear more plausible.
54 Tessa Jowell, ibid
36
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
Jowell sets up her argument through a mix of notions:
exploration; self-confidence; opportunity; investment-
challenge; access; excellence; success; genius; investment-
transcendence (the transcendent thrill of great art);
complexity; human potential; acquiring a sixth (artistic)
sense; aspiration (and poverty of aspiration as the sixth giant
form of poverty that needs to be tackled), before getting to
her point:
12. Too often politicians have been forced to debate culture
in terms only of its instrumental benefits to other agendas -
education, the reduction of crime, improvements in wellbeing
- explaining - or in some instances almost apologising for -
our investment in culture only in terms of something else. In
political and public discourse in this country we have avoided
the more difficult approach of investigating, questioning and
celebrating what culture actually does in and of itself. There
is another story to tell on culture and it's up to politicians in
my position to give a lead in changing the atmosphere, and
changing the terms of debate.
13. Offering improved access to culture for what it does in
itself is a key weapon in fighting the sixth giant, as I have
called it. But for it to be effective in this way we have to
understand it and speak up for it on its own terms - not a
dumbed down culture, but a culture that is of the highest
standard it can possibly be, at the heart of this Government's
core agenda, not as a piece of top down social engineering,
but a bottom up realisation of possibility and potential.
Jowell then moves on to talk about fulfillment; indirect benefits
of art; transformation; access; ladders of opportunity;
benefit; achieving change by [...] giving access to resources
and possibilities; trend; elite; pushing boundaries; attraction;
culture in its own terms; culture as heartland; equality of
opportunity; fairness; future audiences; building blocks;
movingforward; excellence; culture and identity; the individual;
community; nation; population transfer; globalization
(multiculturalism as the acceptable face of globalization);
invention; justice; talent; ambition; etc.
Jowell refers to modernist as well as pre-modernist
discourses (indirectly to the Frankfurt school, directly to
John Ruskin and Otto Klemperer) but hardly to postmodern
or contemporary culture and art theory and practice (off-
mainstream movements, institutional critique, new media,
digital culture, film, television, radio, creative industries, etc),
and while arguing against elitist cultural policy, the "complex"
cultural forms she argues for cannot be but associated with
a certain bourgeois and antiquated idea of what art is;
painting, literature, classical music are the examples she
cites. While arguing for complex culture because it matches
our complex age, she still seems set on the idea that the
modern and analogue is as complex as it gets and finally also
that arts should make a ground for national identity, another
dangerously conservative idea.
Jowell argues that culture has value in and of itself- a
statement that does not say much since it does not refer to a
specific interpretation of culture. In terms of Guattaris three
concepts of culture she invokes to the elitist ("complex") and
the collective type, to argue against the dominance (but not
existence) of the popularized, audience- driven third type. She
effectively suggests that if it has to be driven by a market,
"culture" could do with a bit more of a type one and two
approach- sophisticated and fostering a sense of national
excellence, minus the patrician elite. This proposal of a newly
differentiated synthesis between the three types of culture, in
the context of the UK in 2004, suggests a move away from
the dominant rationale of access. I take it to suggest two
things: to keep cultural and specifically arts policy separate
from CRI policy, and to re-regulate it a little. Judging by UK
cultural policies as of mid-2007, where the Arts Council has
just lost a third of its entire budget to the Olympic games
planned for 2007, it is not clear that Jowells speech has had
much of an impact on cultural policy 55 - if such policy can
at all be distinguished from CRI policy in this context. Her
successor as minister of culture is James Purnell, who was
formerly minister of Creative Industries.
55 Paradoxically, Jowell appears as a major supporter
of the Olympic games.
5. .Conclusion: Responding and
relating
Organizing
There increasing awareness of the economization of ideas and
their transmission and the role CRI may play in this. At least
on the left, critical analysis and discourses appear to hold
promise for the development of respondent and differentiated
strategies and initiatives in the field of "culture". Since
welfare and job security are on the decline all over the globe,
questions of countering commercialization and precarization
become more pressing- and responses perhaps more radical.
It seems increasingly important to operate strategically within
as well as outside of institutions and workplaces, following
up and building on experiences, organizational models and
networks that aim to establish different ways of operating
within the field of semiotic production and education. People
from divergent fields are bound to recognize the similarities
of their struggles and the need for joint initiatives and
campaigns that open new possibilities for working, sharing
and learning.
With respect to precarious living, it is clear that within the
CRI - as with most freelance labour- organizing workers is
particularly difficult, as these jobs are characterized by
unstable and/or unregistered employment, and a high
level of individualization. Campaigns that make visible the
exploitation of the people in question are extremely hard
to operate, because pointing to the root causes of their
problems clashes with what is acceptable as critique in
most public as well as private frameworks. However, more
initiatives are coming into place and new strategies are being
devised for understanding and organizing such an intangible
workforce, and making links between struggles in fields as
diverse as design, sex work, cleaning, teaching, etc. The 2007
DCMS report on CRI says that CRI employs lmio people in
themselves, while 800.000 work in creative professions. If
this means that 800.000 people fade in and out of CRI as
freelance workers, there is enormous need and potential to
address the living conditions and aspirations of such people.
Art for art's sake - the creative industries are peopled by
creative talents who themselves get pleasure and utility from
what they do. They are 'called to their art'. One upside from
the business perspective (although it attracts complaints of
exploitation) is that their 'reservation' wages - the lowest they
are prepared to work for - are lower than the marginal value
of what they produce, making labour particularly cheap.
A downside is that the 'talent' care deeply about how the
creative work is organised, which may discourage concessions
or compromises to management. 56
Discourse and Practice
Fostering a discourse around culture that is disconnected
from the rhetoric of Corporate-National vocabularies might
prove impossible. The language surrounding open source,
alternative organizational models and informal networks
partly feeds on the buzzwords of big business and policy,
or has in turn been taken up by those. The exchanges and
blurring zones between economically and socially oriented
discourses is perhaps the best point to illustrate that there
can not be a one-way flow or definitive appropriation of
ideas. Neither CEOs nor activists can prevent the seepage or
translation of their ideas into other fields. Adornos comment
that no form of culture can resist commoditization in the long
run rings true, but I might add that nothing is resistant to
hacking either.
The point is to question and act, not to look for apology: how
to say "access" and "tolerance" differently seems a difficult
problem, and it appears to me that responses will come out
of practices (as much as theories) of organization, and the
micropolitics of relation and communication. Another kind
of discourse will not compensate for exclusion and hierarchy,
because notions of openness, creativity, learning and sharing
take on meaning only when answered by corresponding ways
of meeting r spea king, working, questioning and sharing. All
56 Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Staying
ahead, (Chapter 4, Defining Creative Industries Challenges,
point 4), ibid
these terms are used by big business and state agencies for
pursuing CI growth. One strategy in this context might be the
appropriation of "bullshit"-calling, a technique from the field
of management, which could be applied to both neoliberal as
well as our own discourses. 57
The turn towards the "creative" can be seen as a positive
development in several respects (see the debates around the
"new class"), despite of the extreme danger it bears. It seems
that certain policy makers are also responsive to issues
surrounding these problems, and also that local communities
campaigning for rights, against gentrification, etc. might have
a role to play in shaping the way a corresponding movement or
policy could go. Perhaps a further analysis of these discourses
and practices, both as left and right employ them, can serve
to reinvest some of them with meaning, making them tangible
and translatable to other practices and fields 58 . I suspect it
depends on the way we interrelate discourse and practice,
deal with issues of transmission, organization and visibility
that might bring about awareness and change. Largely this
will depend upon the way in which we establish and affirm
our different ways of interacting instead of focusing on the
visibility of our counter- discourse.
Background
An earlier version of this text formed the basis of a collective
reading, editing and discussion session at a Chelsea College
of Art and Design (London) degree show in summer 2006 59 .
I graduated from this art school and had been trying
to understand the financial as well as decision-making
mechanisms at college and university level (University of
the Arts London, formerly known as London Institute), which
myself and others in these institutions found to be highly
bureaucratic and quite intransparent. The initial text, as
well as an accompanying series of diagrams (printed at the
end of this text) were made in response to this, and as an
intervention into the smooth atmosphere of a graduation art
show. 60
Inevitably, this text is fragmentary and based on personal
experiences and conversations as much as research. The
particular cases and approaches I address are not meant to
establish some canon of references but are merely examples
that struck me as interesting.
57 An adaptation of the buzzword or bullshit- game,
as employed in management meetings, goes like this; during
a meeting or any other kind of language based activity, put
some cards at the disposal of participants/yourself. On
those cards, write down terms that frequently appear. If
during a term appears five times during a short interval,
jump up with the appropriate card and shout "bullshit".
http://www.zeit.de/2006/31/60 Sekunden fuer Bullshit-
Bingo . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword bingo visited
August 2007
58 some interesting initiatives in these fields: http://
www.networkcultures.org/mycreativity/ : http://www.edu-
factory.org/; www.summit.kein.org
59 as part of a self-organized series of events: www.
collide-collabo.org ; www.collabo.omweb.org
60 A group of students, tutors and researchers took
turns in reading the initial text out loud (it was projected
onto a wall and accessible for live editing as well as
online on a Wiki), commented on it, edited it and verbally
related it to their own experiences. It seemed relevant and
helpful to discuss the role of knowledge production and CI
education in the UK, and the ways in which artists and other
culture workers (as most of those present at the debate)
could position themselves in the field of the CI. For those
graduating, it seemed a critical moment to reflect on the
contexts we were coming to recognize ourselves as being
implicated in, and on ways of proceeding from there.
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
Manuela Zechner coordinates the future archive project and
works with Critical Practice Research Cluster at Chelsea Col-
lege of Art and Design, London, as well as being engaged
in various other collaborative projects in the fields of new
media/ art and education. Her current work centers around
archives, dialogical practices and future studies.
trying to represent the financial flows at college and university level: students, teachers and
visitors make drawings, collide-collabo, chelsea college of art london, degree show, 2006
A y^WV
1 J *
P LAY BAC K ,
"Intersubjectivity empha-
sizes that shared cognition
and consensus is essential
in the shaping of our ideas
and relations. Language is
viewed as communal rath-
er than private. Hence it
is problematic to view the
individual as partaking in
a private world, which is
once and for all defined/' n
"Parsimony
stinginess,
o r
is
or
a 'less is
the taking
NT»?ODUCTION
SurvevZStruc
publication:
was originally
A [AN ARTWORK]
GENERALIZED
QUIRY
better' concept of fru
of care a^ arriving at
e o f a\ c t
—
r-t-
n>
to
r-t-
rD
Q_
n
r-+
6
n
O
O QJ rD
n
Cl
rD
rD
rD
Cl
— s
X
<
rD
— ?
LO
n_
QJ
LO
LO
n
r-h
0)
rD o
Q_
n_
O
<
rD
Q_
rD
rD -q
I i
d: o
-J CO
5" o
s *
5" .a.
o
n
rD
rD
Q_
rD
=h
3
rD
Q_
QJ
3
Q_
"O
O
"D
C_
3 *
_. QJ
3 3.
n
Making tn\case
The Generalised
red Interview in thi
e Genemiis^Stlfvey
ced to be used in
the context of a workshop, as a set
of questions about what you do to
earn giving. The Generalised Surve;
s appropriated from surveys ori
constructed by Karl Marx to be
ied to French work-in the
SuGh-iffCfl<er surveys
was meant to draw together a range
of issues concerning the organisation
and structuring of work, so that per-
haps seemingly unconnected relation-
ships of industrial organisation would
emerge in their true communion to the
surveyed. So why work, in this publi-
cation? Originally, the workshop con-
text in which The Generalised Survey
served as an entry to a methodical ap-
proach, was part of a week of events
which dealt quite extensively with the
so- called "creative industries." Hav-
ing read this publication you will be
aquainted with the term. The crea-
tive industries is a bag concept. It is
a hard figure to grasp; it is a politi-
cal model, a conglomerate of market
actors, part educational reform part
institutional reform, a network of fi-
nancial packages, part public part
private. It is new opportunities and
a vast system of control. When we
deal with such complex and interlo-
cking factors, not least in respect to
the market, it is tempting to describe
the object at hand as a 'phenomena 1
to make it more material. In relation
to the tendencies we see prominent
within the creative industries in terms
of work, much has been made out of
the 'phenomenons' of flexibility and
insecurity. The CRI sector makes ex-
tensive use of unorganised labor and
various modes of employment com-
monly described as "precarious":
insecure, temporary contracts bene-
ficial to the employer, but compromis-
ing the rights of employees.
So, The Genemlise^Snfvey is an at-
Jejiipt^at^OLTUining an approach for
assembling and assessing pressum-
tions, ideas, realities and definitions
about and of work. Work, in this pub-
lication, because certain things which
are, as mentioned earlier, often called
phenomena, offset the relationship
between labor and matters ques-
tioned and analysed elsewhere in this
publication, such as education, infor-
mation or artistic practice, in certain
ways. Said 'phenomena' influence the
pronounciation and enunciation of
'work' with regards to definition, role
and content. Contemporary critique
of these 'phenomena' places great
emphasis on the societal effects of
new, socially expansive, definitions
of labor and henceforth, it is the idea
that this approach is illustrated here
by the example of work, but that this
way of thinking tools the approach for
application in other fields of inquiry.
An ambition of the editor is also some-
thing of a snapshot of current tenden-
cies. As such it is really interesting
to note the rather obvious relation-
ship between this approach and that
of, for instance, the 'Future Archive'
project. While FA takes, as a point of
entry, a performative and playful ap-
proach, and this project consentrate
on the formal and normative 'science'
and theory of inquiry, both projects
will in their application share a will-
ingness towards the examination of
provitional knowledge, accumulation
[recording] of experience and hy-
pothesis. While FA deal with imagined
futures [and so indirectly reflects on
the now] this approach would aim to
build a technique to qualitatively as-
sess knowledge about forces affect-
ing us in the present, and arrive at a
certain precicion of awareness with
regards to the origin, objective and
range of these forces. As such, these
approaches, to an extent, mirror each
other: while FA asks participators to
indirectly comment on contemporary
society through imagining possible
futures, /ft/5 approach devices a form
of defining forces influencing these
futures, working under the assump-
tion that they influence all futures.
CHARACTER
of work
BRIEF HISTORY
The basis of this approach is a sur-
vey which has, in terms of labor, its
antecedent in very practical applica-
tion. Historically, Friedrich Engel's
case studies of Manchester workers
and Karl Marx' 'structured interview'
forms the basis for the appropriated
survey spread across the following
pages. A word on the character of these
worker surveys is necessary. Marx'
original survey, or "structured inter-
view" was 100 questions designed to
cover many aspects of working life. It
was intended for French workers, and
published in Revue Socialiste shortly
before Marx' death in 1883. The ob-
jective of these 100 questions was
to connect different and seamingly
unrelated aspects of labor conditions
and labor organisation to generate
awareness of what is called, in Marx-
ist terms, "primary contradictions,"
the division of labor and the classes.
Marx wanted the structured interview
distributed among French workers to
raise awareness and enable French
labor organisations to claim rights
similar to those then recently intro-
duced in the UK, where Marx was liv-
ing, such as the 10 hour working day
and minor legal working age.
For the organizations of the Italian
'Operaisti,' or 'Workerist,' movement
this kind of investigation became a
blueprint for what they termed 'Criti-
cal Inquiry' or 'Co- research.' This
followed the same model in that the
interview form was widely used, but
by the mid 1970s the 'discipline' had
acquired a motivation of 'conscious-
ness raising' with regards to the indi-
vidual worker - rather being conceived
as the legal or 'state- body' (the idea
was that a republican state, France,
should follow a monarchical govern-
ment, the UK, and launch inquiries
into how to improve labor conditions)
inquiry into social conditions that
formed Marx' approach
_Q
o
£=
=5
—"5
CO
_Q
o
£=
CD
<
=5
=5"
^<
CL
Onq
co"
CD
CD
tre
"O
— s
ny
CD
O
CT
3
CD
O
en
3
ce
CO
>
CO
=r
i— H
=r
CD
=r
CD
CD
O
=r
CD
CD
CO
0^
CO
=r
t—y-
CD
=r
E5
CD
CD
_Q
£=
3
CD
— s
CD
O
=r
LT)
CD
type
CD
=5
CD
ugm^
iCCO
CD
=5
c=
E$
iqu
=5
OQ
0^
=5
O
ac
1 — H
=r
CD
wle
Q_
cd"
<
OQ
<
CD
CD
CD
CO
OUS
res
CO
0
CD
<— 1-
^<
<
3"
~o
=5"
CD
OQ
CO
CL
cf
O
£=
5"
CT
1— H
"Abduction is what we use to generate a likely hypothesis or an initial diagnosis in response
to a phenomenon of interest or a problem of concern, while deduction is used to clarify, to
derive, and to explicate the relevant consequences of the selected hypothesis, and induc-
tion is used to test the sum of the predictions against the sum of the data." n
LU
LT)
CL
_l
<
u
LU
LO
LU
X
h-
LL
o
o
o
LO
LO
The interesting thing about Marx' ap-
proach to the survey is that it is de-
signed to politicise. Marx' structured
interview is different from question-
naires designed to build statistical
data or, say, market demographics.
Such approaches are off course not
'objective,' they carry assumptions,
but they are designed to collect the
broadest possible data set in order to
arrive at effective policy or a market-
able product. Marx' strucured inter-
view is a priori critical. It is based on
opinion arrived at prior to formulating
the questions of the survey.
Initially thinking about the inquiry, a
pragmatic approach is useful. It is the
purpose of the inquiry, as well as the
purpose of the thing in a given constel-
lation we wish to get a picture of. The
inquiry is meaningful when it leads to
knowledge and/or certainty. The goal
of the inquiry is to reduce doubt, and
if possible lead to the end of inquiry.
Theory of inquiry uses three kinds of
interferences, known from the branch
of philosophy refered to as logic. The
three interferences are:
P LAY BAC K , P LAY F0RWA R D
It is processes similar to these in-
terferences that are performed when
construcing an inquiry into any 'phe-
nomenon.' The inquiry consists of a
range of assumptions and hypothesis
formulated as questions [adopting the
ethos of a priori criticality] - they will
then be sorted as premisses, evalu-
ated in turn by the presition of the
conclusion towards they lead us.
AND
DEDUCTION
ABDUCTION
INDUCTION
These three interferences work in a
cyclical fashion, their usefulness is re-
duced when isolated from any of the
other. QUOTE:
It is clear that without a stringent
ethos of inquiry, the hypothesis will
stay a hypothesis, and lead nowhere.
Of central concern is also that this
does not become an exercise in ask-
ing questions for questions sake. Even
when dealing with complex bodies of
information and multiple characteris-
tics, the objective of the inquiry must
remain determinacy.
Its tempting to say that the methodol-
ogy of Marx' survey, when applied less
strictly, with restriction, yes, but still
allowing for provitional understand-
ing, and taking the expansive nature
of fields of inquiry into account, could
build something of a phenomenology.
But this rather depends on what defi-
nition we would want of our object,
for that too is a strategical concern.
In Kant, phenomenon: the object as it
appears is contrasted with the term
noumenon: an epistemological con-
cept, the object in a certain mode of
cognition. \
This is akin to the thinking that led to
the workshop: objectification, not by
any authoritarian definition, but un-
derstood and acted upon by a collec-
tive, intellectual and radical capacity,
delineated and constructed with a col-
lective, political understanding of the
object at hand.
"In the pragmatic way of thinking everything has a purpose, and the purpose of
doubt and lead to a state of belief, which a person in that state will usually call knol/vled
kinds of inference describe a cycle that can be understood only as a whole, and r
of abduction is to generate guesses of a kind that deduction can explicate and that induction can evaluate. This places a mild but meaningful constraint on the production of
3ach thing is the first thing we should try to note about it. The purpose of inquiry is to reduce
ge or certainty. As they contribute to the end of inquiry, we should appreciate that the three
one of the three makes complete sense in isolation from the others. For instance, the purpose
<
LO
LU
o
LU
u
to
>
>■
cc
o
<
u
_l
Q_
Q_
<
LU
X
I-
Q
<
o
I-
u
-z.
=>
o
to
LO
>3
<
<
hypotheses, since it is not just any wild guess at explanation that submits itself to reason and bows out when defeated in a match with reality. In a similar fashion, each of the
other types of inference realizes its purpose only in accord with its proper role in the whole cycle of inquiry. No matter how much it may be necessary to study these processes
in abstraction from each other, the integrity of inquiry places strong limitations on the effective modularity of its principal components. "a
BRIEF HISTORY
[■continued]
- The approach also bled into main-
stream development practice: In 1980,
an International Forum on 'Participa-
tory Research' was held in what was
then the Socialist Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia. The discipline of 'Par-
ticipatory Research' acknowledges
the same origins of inquiry as the
'Operaisti,' but explicitly draws on a
much wider concoction of social and
political theory and international ex-
perience - ranging from the subversion
of third world research paradigms on
behalf of western interests, feminist
research, socialist science to popu-
lar education - to resource allocation
and the use/exploitation of these.
PHENOMENON
DATA
Beliefs
ABDUCTION
Knowledge
STRUCTURED INTERVIEW/GEN-
ERALISED SURVEY
HYPOTHESIS
DEDUCTION
CONSEQUENCE
INDUCTION
COGNITION
INTERFERENCE
ANALYSIS
AGENCY
"Inference is the act or process of deriving a conclu-
sion based solely on what one already knows."n
ACTION
Thruths
^ "Agency considered in the philosophical sense is the capacity of an agent to act in a world. The agency is considered as belonging to that agent, even
I— if that agent represents a fictitious character, or some other non-existent entity. The capacity to act does not at first imply a specific moral dimension
q to the ability to make the choice to act.
Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world. It is normally contrasted to natural forces,
which are causes involving only unthinking deterministic processes. In this it is subtly distinct from the concept of free will, the philosophical doctrine
that our choices are not the product of causal chains, but are significantly free or undetermined. Human agency entails the uncontroversial, weaker
claim that humans do in fact make decisions and enact them on the world. How humans come to make decisions, by free choice or other processes, is
another issue.
The capacity of a human to act as an agent is personal to that human, though considerations of the outcomes flowing from particular acts of human
agency for us and others can then be thought to invest a moral component into a given situation wherein an agent has acted, and thus to involve moral
agency. If a situation is the consequence of human decision making, persons may be under a duty to apply value judgements to the consequences of
their decisions, and held to be responsible for those decisions.
In certain philosophical traditions (particularly those established by Hegel and Marx), human agency is a collective, historical dynamic, more than
a function arising out of individual behavior. Hegel's Geist and Marx's universal class are idealist and materialist expressions of this idea of humans
treated as social beings, organized to act in concert."**
a quoted from www.wikipedia.org
# What is your trade?
# Does the shop in which you work be-
long to a capitalist or to a limited com-
pany/ State the names of the capitalist
owners or directors of the company.
# State the number of persons em-
ployed.
# State their age and sex.
# What is the youngest age at which
children are taken off (boys or girls)?
# State the number of overseers and
other employees who are not rank and
file hired workers.
# Are their apprentices? How many?
# Apart from the usual and regularly
employed workers, are there others
who come in at definite seasons?a
# Does your employer' undertaking
work exclusively or chiefly for local or-
ders, or for the home market generally,
or for export abroad?
# Is the shop in a village, or in a town?
State the locality.
# If your shop is in the country, is there
sufficient work in the factory for your
existence or are you obliged to com-
bine it with agricultural labor/
# Do you work with your hands or with
the help of machinery?
# State details as to the division of la-
bor in your factory.
# Is stream used as motive power?
# State the number of rooms in which
the various branches of production are
carried on. Describe the specialty in
which you are engaged. Describe not
only the technical side, but the mus-
cular and nervous strain required, and
its general effect on the health of the
workers.
# Describe the hygienic conditions in
the workshops; the size of the rooms,
space allotted to every worker, ventila-
tion, temperature, plastering, lavato-
ries, general cleanliness, noise of ma-
chinery, metallic dust, dampness, etc.
# Is there any municipal or government
supervision of hygienic conditions in
the workshops?
# Are there in your industry particu-
lar effluvia which are harmful for the
health and produce specific diseases
among the workers?
# Is the shop overcrowded with machin-
ery?
# Are safety measures to prevent acci-
dents applied to the engine, transmis-
sion and machinery?
# How many different managers are
there at your workplace?
# Do you know any 'managers' outside
your profession?
# Are you aware of the effects on your
company, if any, by the US invasion of
Afghanistan?
# Do you personally know anyone who
has recently been made unemployed?
# Why did this happen?
# What percentage of your weekly or
monthly wage is spent on water?
# What percentage of your weekly or
monthly wage is spent on electricity?
# What percentage of your weekly or
monthly wage is spent on gas?
# Are you aware of the effects on your
company, if any, by the US/UK inva-
sion of Iraq?
# Describe wage increases during so-
called prosperity periods.
# Have you ever been on strike?
Describe why?
# If you produce commodities, com-
pare the price of the commodities you
manufacture with the price of your la-
bor.
# Have you experienced, on part of
your self or others, forced redundan-
cy because of the introduction of new
technology?
# Do you work in a new building?
# Are you aware of what that building
housed prior to your company?
# Are you member of a union?
# Were strikes in your trade ever sup-
ported by strikes of workers belonging
to other trades?
# Does it exist any alternatives of em-
ployee organization or association to
unions in your profession?
# If work takes place both night and day,
what is the order of the shifts?
# What is the usual lengthening of the
working day in times of good trade?
# Are the machines cleaned by workers
specially hired for that purpose, or do the
workers employed on these machines clean
them free, during their working day?
# What rules and fines exist for latecom-
ers? When does the working day begin,
when it is resumed after the dinner hour
break?
# How much time do you lose in coming to
the workshop and returning home?
# What agreements have you with your
employer? Are you engaged by the day,
week, month, etc.?
# What conditions are laid down regarding
dismissals or leaving employment?
# In the event of a breach of agreement,
what penalty can be inflicted on the em-
ployer, if he is the cause of the breach?
# What penalty can be inflicted on the
worker if he is the cause of the breach?
# If there are apprentices, what are their
conditions of contract?
# Is your work permanent or casual?
# Does work in your trade take place
only at particular seasons, or is the work
usually distributed more or less equally
throughout the year? If you work only at
definite seasons, how do you live in the
intervals?
# Are you paid time or piece rate?
# If you are paid time rate, is it by the
hour or by the day?
# Do you receive additions to your wages
for overtime? How much?
# If you receive piece rates, how are they
fixed? Of you are employed in industries
in which the work done is measured by
quantity or weight, as in the mines, don't
your employers or their clerks resort to
trickery, in order to swindle you out of
part of your wages/
# If you are paid piece rate, isn't the
quality of the goods used as a pretext for
wrongful deductions form your wages?
# Whatever wages you get, whether piece
or time rate, when is it paid to you; in oth-
er words, how long is the credit you give
your employer before receiving payment
for the work you have already carried out?
Are you paid a week later, month, etc.?
# Have you noticed that delay in the pay-
ment of your wages forces you often to
resort to the pawnshops, paying rates of
high interest there, and depriving yourself
of things you need: or incurring debts
with the shopkeepers, and becoming their
victim because you are their debtor? Do
you know of cases where workers have lost
their wages owing to the ruin or bankrupt-
cy of their employers?
# Are wages paid direct by the employer,
or by his agents ((contractors, etc.).)?
# If wages are paid by contractors or
other intermediaries, what are the con-
ditions of your contract?
# What is the amount of your money
wages by the day week?
# What are the wages of the women and
children employed together with you in
the same shop?
# What was the highest daily wage last
month in your shop?
# What was the highest piece wage last
month?
# What were your own wages during the
same time, and if you have a family,
what were the wages of your wife and
children?
# Are wages paid entirely in money, or in
some other form?
# If you rent a lodging from your em-
ployer, on what conditions ? Does he not
deduct the rent from your wages?
# What are the prices of necessary com-
modities, for example:
(a) Rent of your lodging, conditions of
lease, number of rooms, persons living
in them, repair, insurance, buying and
repairing furniture, heating, lighting, wa-
ter, etc.
(b) Food — bread, meat, vegetables, po-
tatoes, etc, dairy produce, eggs, fish,
butter, vegetable, oil, lard, sugar, salt,
groceries, coffee, chicory, beer, wine,
etc., tobacco.
(c) Clothing for parents and children,
laundry, keeping clean, bath, soap, etc.
(d) Various expenses, such as corre-
spondence, loans, payments to pawnbro-
ker, children's schooling and teaching a
trade, newspapers, books, etc., contri-
butions to friendly societies, strikes, un-
ions, resistance associations, etc.
(e) Expenses, if any necessitated by your
duties.
(f) Taxes.
# Try and draw up a weekly and yearly
budget of your income and expenditure
for self and family.
# Have you noticed, in your personal ex-
perience, a bigger rise in the price of
immediate necessities, e.g., rent, food,
etc., than in wages?
# State the changes in wages which you
know of.
# Describe wage increases during so-
called prosperity periods.
# Describe any interruptions in employ-
ment caused by changes in fashions and
partial and general crises. Describe your
own involuntary rest periods.
# Compare the price of the commodi-
ties you manufacture or the services you
render with the price of your labor.
# Quote any cases known to you of work-
ers being driven out as a result of intro-
duction of machinery or other improve-
ments.
# In connection with the development of
machinery and the growth of the produc-
tiveness of labor, has its intensity and
duration increased or decreased?
# Do you know of any cases of increases
in wages as a result of improvements in
production?
# Have you ever known any rank and file
workers who could retire from employ-
ment at the age of 50 and live on the
money earned by them as wage work-
ers.
# How many years can a worker of aver-
age health be employed in your trade?
Over these two pages, Marx' original
100 questions are spread out and
mixed with questions about work for-
mulated for the workshop setting in
which the appropriated survey was
used. The questions formulated for
the workshop draw upon critiques
not exclusively marxist. A number of
concepts important to a range of cri-
tiques and philosophy went into the
thought process of the workshop and
the appropriated survey that was used
for that particular event.
42
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
43
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
# What do you do?
# For how many hours of the week do
you do you this?
# Do you work hours unpaid?
# Describe the ownership relations
of your trade branch/business/com-
pany
# Describe the average degree of
education with regards to your fellow
employees.
# Describe your work over three aver-
age days
# Name the 5 institutions/bodies/
phenomena/ exerting the most pow-
er over your life.
# Is your company, to your knowl-
edge, involved in activities that entail
breaches of ethical codes of conduct
or direct violations of human or ani-
mal rights abuse?
If yes, which?
# Is your company, to your knowl-
edge, involved in unethical trade re-
lationships?
If yes, describe them.
# Describe to which extent technol-
ogy is part of your everyday working
procedures?
# Do your company have an 'extra
building' for security reasons?
# Are you and/or your family insured
by a workplace scheme?
# Are you employed long- term?
# Are you aware of your business/
company using elongated employ-
ment by short term contract?
# Are you aware of recent forced re-
dundancies?
# Describe the difference in pay be-
tween three company executives and
yourself in chronological order
starting with you.
# Describe the difference in pay be-
tween you and three employees to
which you are senior.
# In the course of your working week,
would you describe your eating hours
as irregular?
# Do you work at night?
# Do your company employ an 'indi-
vidual pay' policy?
If yes, are you aware of the criteria
for wage assessment?
# Do your company employ interns?
If yes, are you aware of their con-
tractual agreements with regards to
pay?
# Are you paid at a weekly or a
monthly rate?
# Are you aware of the effects on
your company, if any, by 9/11?
# Are you in debt?
# Mention the accidents which have tak-
en place in your personal knowledge.
# If you work in a mine, state the safety
measures adopted by your employer to
ensure ventilation and prevent explo-
sions and other accidents.
# If you work in a chemical factory, at
an iron works, at a factory producing
metal goods, or in any other industry
involving specific dangers to health, de-
scribe the safety measures adopted by
your employer.
# What is your workshop lit up by (gas,
oil, etc.)?
# Are there sufficient safety appliances
against fire?
# Is the employer legally bound to com-
pensate the worker or his family in case
of accident?
# If not, has he ever compensated those
who suffered accidents while working
for his enrichment?
# Is first-aid organized in your work-
shop?
# If you work at home, describe the
conditions of your work room. Do you
use only working tools or small ma-
chines? Do you have recourse to the
help of your children or other persons
(adult or children, male or female)? Do
you work for private clients, or for an
employer? Do you deal with him direct
or trough an agent?
# State the number of hours you work
daily, and the number of working days
during the week.
# State the number of holidays in the
course of a year.
# What breaks are there during the
working day?
# Do you take meals at definite inter-
vals, or irregularly? Do you eat in the
workshop or outside?
# Does work go on during meal times?
# If steam is used, when is it started
and when stopped?
# Does work go on at night?
# State the number of hours of work of
children and young people under 16.
# Are there shifts if children and young
people replacing each other alternately
during working hours?
# Has the government or municipality
applied the laws regulating child la-
bor? Do the employers submit to these
laws?
# Do schools exist for children and
young people employed in your trade? If
they exist, in what hours do the lessons
take place? Who manages the schools?
What is taught in them?
# Do any resistance associations exist in your
trade and how are they led? Send us their
rules and regulations.
# How many strikes have taken place in your
trade that you are aware of?
# How long did these strikes last?
# Were they general or partial strikes?
# Were they for the object of increasing wag-
es, or were they organized to resist a reduc-
tion of wages, or connected with the length
of the working day, or prompted by other mo-
tives?
# What were their results?
# Tell us of the activity of the courts of arbi-
tration.
# Were strikes in your trade ever supported by
strikes of workers belonging to other trades?
# Describe the rules and fines laid down by
your employer for the management of his
hired workers.
# Have there ever existed associations among
the employers with the object of imposing a
reduction of wages, a longer working day, of
hindering strikes and generally imposing their
own wishes?
# Do you know of cases when the government
made unfair use of the armed forces, to place
them at the disposal of the employers against
their wage workers?
# Are you aware of any cases when the govern-
ment intervened to protect the workers from
the extortions of the employers and their il-
legal associations?
# Does the government strive to secure the ob-
servance of the existing factory laws against
the interests of the employers? Do its inspec-
tors do their duty?
# Are there in your workshop or trade any
friendly societies to provide for accidents,
sickness, death, temporary incapacity, old
age, etc.? Send us their rules and regula-
tions.
# Is membership of these societies voluntary
or compulsory? Are their funds exclusively
controlled by the workers?
# If the contributions are compulsory, and
are under the employers' control, are they
deducted from wages? Do the employers pay
interest for this deduction? Do they return
the amounts deducted to the worker when he
leaves employment or is dismissed? Do you
know of any cases when the workers have ben-
efitted from the so-called pensions schemes,
which are controlled by the employers, but
the initial capital of which is deducted before-
hand from the workers' wages?
# Are there cooperative guilds in your trade?
How are they controlled? Do they hire workers
for wages in the same ways as the capitalists?
Send us their rules and regulations.
# Are there any workshops in your trade in
which payment is made to the workers partly
in the form of wages and partly in the form of
so-called profit sharing? Compare the sums
received by these workers and the sums re-
ceived by other workers who don't take place
in so-called profit sharing. State the obliga-
tions of the workers living under this system,
may they go on strike, etc. or are they only
permitted to be devoted servants of their em-
ployers?
# What are the general physical, intellectual
and moral conditions of life of the working
men and women employed in your trade?
# If yes, are these alternatives
present at your place of work?
# Have you experienced, on part of
your self or others, arrest at any
workplace?
# Describe the reaction by other
employees and/or employers.
# Do you feel empowered to carry
out your work in compliance with
your personal ethical and/or politi-
cal convictions?
# Do you feel expendable?
# Describe your pensions scheme.
# What are the general physical, in-
tellectual and moral conditions of
life of the working men and women
employed in your trade?
# Describe how creativity is en-
couraged or discouraged in your
position?
# Have you experienced, on part of
your self or others, payment bonus
in relation to having submitted a
good idea?
# General ...
# General remarks.
By Grim Erland. Contact: grim.erland@gmail.com
Grim Erland is an artist currently living and working
in Oslo, Norway. Past projects include Collide/Col-
labo, [collaborative] the Collective Strategies semi-
nar series at The Art Academy of Oslo, and research
on behalf of Beyond the Free Market, London.
44
P LAY BAC K , P LAY FORWA R D
COLOPHON
Edited by Manuela Zechner
With contributions by: Anja Kanngieser, Grim Svingen, Rozalinda Borcila, Valie Djordjevic, BLW, Neil Cummings, Manuela
Zechner, Everybodies, Critical Practice, Paz Rojo
Merci: Berno Odo Polzer, Nicolas Couturier, Anja Kanngieser, Grim Svingen and many others
September 2009
p I ayf o rwa rd @f u t u rea rc h i ve. o rg
for a Pdf version of this newspaper see
http://www.archive.org/details/PlaybackPlayforward_pdf
or for printing: http://www.archive.org/details/PlaybackPlayforward_pdf_a4
I
03
03
MKRU
medienkunstraumunna
mit freundlicher
Unterstutzung durch die
Kulturbetriebe Unna/ Medien Kunst Raum Unna
Zib
playback, playforward refers to the general title Q -
or rubric for a series of participatory workshops and
discussions on respeaking, starting from BLW work (see -3
texts by BLW and Rozalinda Borcila in this publication).
Some of these happen with students, others in more infor- ^
mal learning situations, play back, play forward was also —
the title of a workshop facilitated by Rozalinda Borcila, Anja Q -
Kanngieser and Manuela Zechner at summit (see text on ^
Negotiating speech and organizational practices) in Berlin ~
2007.
-1— »
CD
o
CD
>
o
03
Kulturbetriebe Unna
Zentrum fur
Information und Bildung
The texts in this publication, unless other wise stated
are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribu-
tion-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. To view
a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Crea-
tive Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San
Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
http://www. arch ive.org/detai Is/ PlaybackPlayforward_pdf_a4
